now playing: tom waits - used songs

There are days when I feel like only Tom Waits understands me.

I remember back in college I had Bone Machine on one side of a tape and the Beastie Boys' Check Your Head on the other. They seemed to go together, in an early-nineties noise drang kinda way. It was my introduction to Tom Waits, and the tape grew worn and paint-spattered as it provided the soundtrack for a lonely summer spent painting walls Bone and Navaho in Porter College.

I didn't know then that Tom Waits had a catalog going back to the year of my birth. And some of his best work was back then. His early years were spent in a Kerouac-inspired haze, a place made of booze, cigarettes, and stories, where it always seems to be night. Naturally, I love the stuff.

My current audio obsession is his latest album, Used Songs: 1973-1980. The year I was born, Tom Waits was already singing about car crashes and small towns, the call of the road and the emptiness of a crowd.

Listening to it this morning makes me wonder what ever happened to that cherished tape, and if the halls of Porter College still hide all the stickers and graffiti I painted over that summer.

{ 12:16pm }