Tom Waits had begun his transformation from piano balladeer to the bandleader of a clattering, cacophonous urban symphony on the 1983 album Swordfishtrombones. He perfected that wholly unique racket on the 1985 LP Rain Dogs.
The album is 19 songs long, and there’s not one that’s a throwaway. Let’s dig deep into Rain Dogs and check out the five finest songs. (Or at least our humble opinion of them).
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5. “Blind Love”
Waits hits on just about every music genre ever created throughout the course of Rain Dogs. “Blind Love” gives him a chance to churn out a country weeper, and, like everything else on the record, he nails it. It’s also a lot of fun to go through the credits and see some of the players who show up on these tracks. In this case, Keith Richards adds some guitar as well as those inimitable moaning backing vocals. You also get guitar licks laid down by Robert Quine, more of an avant-garde type player. And of course, there’s Waits’ distinctive croon on top of it all.
4. “Downtown Train”
The songs on Rain Dogs are loosely connected by a theme of urban life, as populated by the folks who don’t often get the spotlight. Romance doesn’t come into play all that often with these characters, who are mostly worrying about doing what it takes to survive, even if it means scheming, conniving, or worse. But before and after these albums, Waits always did a fantastic job with stories of relationships between people who might not seem to have anything but each other. “Downtown Train” falls into line with those songs, and it’s an absolute beauty.
3. “Anywhere I Lay My Head”
How do you close out an album with such a wild stew of characters and styles? Musically, Waits chooses to bring things to a close with a kind of New Orleans funeral vibe, with drowsy horns and ace percussionist Michael Blair battering away at a parade drum. Lyrically, he goes into first-person mode and gets inside a character who easily could have been any one of the dozens that he inhabits or describes throughout the rest of the album. It’s someone who has been through all the hard times and has been knocked about pillar to post, but still finds some sort of skewed grace in the middle of it all.
2. “Singapore”
Waits couldn’t have chosen any better for an opening track for this album. With “Singapore,” he’s essentially throwing down the gauntlet to listeners, seeing who’s willing to go along for the wild ride. There aren’t going to be many typical pop/rock rhythms or melodies, but if you stick around, you just might end up with an experience that’s all the richer for its quirkiness. And that’s an apropos notion considering the topic of the song, which is a surreal sailing voyage of the damned. We’re all as mad as hatters here, Waits barks out, and as a listener, you can bask vicariously in that madness.
1. “Time”
With an accordion wheezing away softly in the background, Waits gets all sentimental at the end of Side One of Rain Dogs. And it’s one of the greatest triumphs in his entire career. For much of this record, the tone is somewhat defiant and frantic, the people populating these songs diving headlong into their somewhat hardscrabble circumstances with brio. But “Time” steps back and assesses the toll taken on lives lived in the balance between daring to dream for something grand and trying to muddle through the harshness of reality being thrown in their faces. Waits dares to give us an old-fashioned notion as the ultimate solution: It’s time that you loved.
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