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Tom Waits - The Heart of Saturday Night

Drift Sunday Classic

Tom Waits - The Heart of Saturday Night

Originally released fifty years ago this Autumn - and kick-starting a decade-long relationship with Bones Howe, who produced the entire ‘Asylum years’ collection of albums - The Heart of Saturday Night is the second studio album from raconteur extraordinaire, Tom Waits.


Without the hindsight of knowing what Tom Waits would accomplish across his recording career, it’s hard to comprehend exactly where The Heart of Saturday Night landed in the Autumn of 1974. Broadly, a singer song-writer record that followed his well-received Closing Time debut - itself a sort of fish-out-of-water collection on ballads about drinking and boozing - and a set very much based on the deeply nighttime characters who Waits had encountered, or perhaps, had lived himself in bars and dives as they disappeared into America’s commercial progresses.
Tom Waits - The Heart of Saturday Night
In interviews at the time of release - and across his singular career since - Waits has sighted Jack Kerouac (especially) as an influence on his everyman-poetry. Although Closing Time had gestured towards it, The Heart of Saturday Night is all about the balladry. A versatile but honest and deeply first person experience of a city-scene that created its protagonist. It is a concept album about gathering together at the end of the night and celebrating its riches; from the overflowing glass to the side street hustle. Even the front cover image is indebted to Frank Sinatra’s ‘In the Wee Small Hours’; a neon-lit imagining of Waits encouraged by a nameless blonde under street light.

The Heart of Saturday Night is so enduring, and although it is the first time we’ve written about Waits for Sunday Classic, it certainly won’t be the last. His mid-seventies to mid-eighties period is absolutely some of the most enigmatic cannon of writing and recording from anyone around. The ‘Asylum Years’, in particular, cover the freaks, the weirdos and anyone who has ever taken a drink and thought about where they fall amongst the grand perspective of human existence.

Before his voice cracked into a stylistic entity all of its own, The Heart of Saturday Night found Waits delivering conversational prose of his own standpoint on Saturday night engagements. It is a time capsule listening of the highest order, songs about celebrating the riches of the moment.

Idiosyncratic and full of beguiling beauty.