GP's Song of the Day: Tom Waits

By Graeme Whitfield on Aug 4, 09 02:01 PM

Not quite sure how it's taken me 127 songs to pick something by Tom Waits, but I hope this will make up for my tardiness.

Downtown Train is from Waits' 1985 album Rain Dogs, which no home should be without. (It was described by one critic as "bony and beautiful" which sounds about right.)

The video was directed by trendy Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Mondino and features the boxer Jake LaMotta, whose life was the basis of the film Raging Bull.

There are few better lyricists than Tom Waits and Downtown Train is one of his great love poems to New York: "Outside another yellow moon punched a hole in the nighttime/
I climb through the window and down the street, shining like a new dime/The downtown trains are full with all those Brooklyn girls/They try so hard to break out of their little worlds."

(Rod Stewart recorded a cover version of Downtown Train in 1989 and it was a big hit all over the world but you really need to search out the original.)

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