Tom Waits - Coney Island Baby

Listen: Tom Waits - Coney Island Baby

I was tempted to respond to Kendall's Coney Island post with something from one of the Mermaid Avenue albums, but this one is a better fit. You see, when Kendall and I started dating, the very first mix CD (yes, I am embarrassed that it wasn't a mix tape) that I made for her had this devastatingly beautiful Tom Waits song mentioning Coney Island. But when I started doing a bit of research on that song ("Take It With Me" from Mule Variations), I found that Waits has a bit of a lyrical obsession with Coney Island and the bygone Dreamland amusement park depicted in our postcard. I guess the Dreamland pun is just too perfect to avoid (e.g. "I will close my eyes and wake up there in Dreamland" in the song "Flowers Grave").

Today's song also play's with the dual meanings ("Every night she comes to take me out to Dreamland"). It comes from the 2002 album Blood Money, an album of songs that Waits and his wife Kathleen wrote for musical adaptation of an unfinished work by a early 19th century German playwright. The musical, Woyzeck, is a collaboration between Waits and Robert Wilson, the avant-garde theater artist who once staged a seven day long play on seven mountains in Iran.

I'll let Waits paraphrase the plot of Woyzeck:

It's a story that continues to surface in Europe. Wilson told me about this lowly soldier who submitted to medical experiments and went slowly mad from taking medications and herbs. He finds out his wife is unfaithful. He slits her throat and throws his knife in the lake, goes in after it and drowns, and then his child is raised by the village idiot. I said, "OK, I'm in. You had me at 'slit her throat.'"

(Thanks to the Tom Waits Library for providing an incredible amount of info about a musician I really should listen to more often.)

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