romance

Today I’ve listened to Tom Waits’ Asylum Years twice.

Twice.

I can’t remember the last time I listened to a record twice in the same week, let alone the same day. Blame it on the easy thievery MP3s and the libraic choice they lend to the listener, or the attention span of a hyperactive toddler that I seem to posess. Either way, it’s a rare occurence that has nurtured something I’ve not felt for a long time. It’s reawakened the romace within me.

The album is a collection of songs he wrote whilst signed to Asylum Records, his early years. The ones he spent presenting himself as a booze sipping lounge singer, wit and observation flowing from his mouth as easily as notes from the piano he pounded and caressed.

Waits himself is just as much a romanticized figure as his music. It’s easily done when you craft songs that display unique individuals in often dingy worlds of booze, sex and unmoralistic circumstances as he did on his later work, his “weird” work. But when you’re seemingly nothing more than a lounge troubador with an occaisionally gravelly voice and sparkling turn of phrase, that’s something to be admired and on repeated listening, something to be adored and deservedly mystified.

Romance is a hazy state of being that’s eluded me for years now, a ghost of an emotion I’ve been searching for using beer as my map and whiskey as my compass. Waits’ lounge songs are drenched in booze and the dramas that begin, end and drift in and out of bars, it’s an underlying theme that links these soap operas together, whether it be the beginning, the middle or the end. It’s this haze and musk, these almost indesrcibable feelings clumped together in vague terminology from which romance is born.

Sure, his later work had more musical scope, but he had just as much musical depth in these tunes. The lyrics are just poignant, if more predictable, in fact, I defy you to be a romantic young man and not imagine yourself as an onlooker in his tales without relishing it. Hell, I defy you to feel like you’re not there when the shit goes down.

So I’ve found romance again, I’ll probably cling to it for a few months. During that time I’m not only going to wallow in it, but take these feelings and use them to dare threw daily events, be it by fist, jaw or lips. With PMA restored I’m going to lounge around in smoke and search for love and fisticuffs.