Album Review: Tom Waits, ‘The Heart of Saturday Night’
Fifty years ago, Tom Waits released his second album, The Heart of Saturday Night. Much like Edward Hopper’s painting “Nighthawks,” Waits’ album captures the shadowy interplay of loneliness and longing, desire and desolation. Waits’ cinematic concept album takes Hopper one step further, though, portraying the denizens of late-night jazz clubs spilling out into the early morning shadows searching for solace, a cigarette, or the bleary colors of the dawn. Waits’ characters are set loose on their search for meaning, cruising the boulevards, “looking for the heart of Saturday night.” They’re hopped up Beats scatting to the bebop of Thelonius Monk or Charlie Parker, inflected with a New Orleans jazz blues.
The album’s opening track, “New Coat of Paint,” swings into motion with a swaying, bluesy vamp about a couple throwing a “new coat of paint/on this lonesome old town” as well as on their relationship: “Our love needs a transfusion let’s shoot it full of wine.” Waits’ yearning vocals flow over tumbling rivulets of piano and strings on the lushly gospel-inflected “San Diego Serenade,” an ode to the ways that absence ushers in presence: “I never saw the morning ‘til I stayed up all night/I never saw the sunshine ‘til you turned out the light.” Smoky jazz club rhythms, wrapped in a languid conversation between sax and trumpet, provide the foundation for the tale of a truck driver on the languorous “Semi Suite,” while “Diamonds on My Windshield” features Waits’ scatting recitation about rolling down the road set against the spare beat of a snare drum and thumping bass. The song combines the fervor of the angel-headed hipsters of Ginsberg’s “Howl” with the peripatetic patter of Kerouac’s On the Road flowing along the rhythms of avant-garde jazz. The title track saunters along to a walking bass line as the singer searches for the meaning that animates the ramblings of the men and women strolling along sidewalks outside of clubs on a Saturday night. Opulent strings and cascading piano notes envelop the Sinatra-like jazz lounge stylings of “Please Call Me, Baby.” The album closes with the spare, melancholy recitation “The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone’s Pizza House).”
To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of The Heart of Saturday Night, Anti- Records has reissued the album on 180g Raspberry Beret-colored vinyl, limited to 3700 copies, as well as 180g slightly gold vinyl, limited to 800 copies. The Heart of Saturday Night showcases Waits’ turn from folk to jazz and blues, as well as featuring for the first time his spoken-word recitations—as on “Diamonds on My Windshield”—that would become a hallmark of his music.
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More information about The Heart of Saturday Night is available HERE
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