Tom Waits - Heart Of Saturday Night CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

that make the very effort of drawing breath seem a life-and-death proposition.

"Saving All My Love for You," "Ruby's Arms" and "On the Nickel" boast the same morbid pathos as "Jersey Girl." With their wistful folk-pop melodies and Fifties film-score orchestrations, they suggest the pop-song equivalents of hand-tinted antique post cards. Or at least that's what the singer's down-and-out delivery turns them into. Of course, Tom Waits' derelict-poet-saint, gazing up from the gutter to find a rainbow, is an assumed character. Yet it's only partly an act. For almost a decade, Waits has submerged his own personality and played this role so completely that he's now a willing surrogate for all the low-life dreamers who don't have his gift of gab.

But in a time when hipness is often equated with selfishness, Waits' woozy, far-out optimism has never seemed fresher. While he can be faulted on many counts–the godawful condition of his voice, his perverse love for dime-store kitsch imagery–the purity of his intentions is never in question: Tom Waits finds more beauty in the gutter than most people would find in the Garden of Eden. If his lack of objectivity has kept him from developing into a major artist, Waits' indivisibility from his self-created persona makes him a unique and lovable minor talent. (RS 336)

STEPHEN HOLDEN