#357: Rain Dogs
Revisiting Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2020)
Tom Waits, 1985
For The Next 500 #28, I wrote about 1980’s Heartattack and Vine, the album that introduced me to Tom Waits. I mentioned other Tom Waits songs I knew, including “Come On Up to the House,” the closing track on the 2025 Rian Johnson film Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. The film was about faith and devotion, among other things, and Tom Waits’s track from 1999’s Mule Variations was an incredible selection to sum up the emotions generated by the ending of the film. Waits has a tendency to create sympathy among conflicting emotions, drawing such dynamic characters within each of his songs. His narrators are dark, brooding figures with, one imagines, spotty backgrounds. Waits’s voice is full of the lives lived prior to that point, adding weight to the already heavy songs. Even pure love songs like “Jersey Girl” have the weight of regret to them. The listener must do heavy lifting as a result to get the full intention from Waits, or so it seems.
“Come On Up to the House” is especially poignant in that moment, the point at which the viewer is asked to reconcile conflicting emotions about faith and faithful people. However, Rian Johnson does the heavy lifting, and when the song comes on the viewer is open and receptive to Waits’s vision (this is also evident in The Wire: after one even one episode, Waits’s theme song “Down in the Hole” opens up the viewer to rest of the heavy themes and intense emotions of the show).
Perhaps I’ve connected it too much to religious reconciliation, a soul conflicted, or at least challenging itself to be good. But Tom Waits is like that: his albums are meditations on redemption and forgiveness, asking questions about life’s intention and purpose in the world. Faith and devotion are attached, too. Waits inspires his listeners to ask questions of themselves and of established norms, even if it’s only of the established norms of pop music.
Rain Dogs is no different. Heartattack and Vine seems like pop music next to this 1985 dirge. All the songs are stripped down, like they pulled the instruments from the curb and repaired them as best they could before the recording. He brings many different elements to each song, some having a street band feel, others sounding like American folk songs. But the standouts are the most melodic: “Hand Down Your Head,” “Time,” and the brilliant “Downtown Train.” The result is a street choir, hymns sung to all parishioners, not just the best-dressed.
This time around, “Time” really stuck out to me. It’s such a beautiful song, sad sketches of longing. My favourite line is “And the things you can’t remember / Tell the things you can’t forget / That history puts a saint in every dream” and then, further down, “Are those dreams or are those prayers?” Rain Dogs features a little of both, each of the 19 tracks a novel of meaning and intention: a grand sermon from pastor Waits.
I love Tom Waits.