So, inspired by this Gobshout article on Kelly Clarkson’s English language bustin’ single ‘My Life Would Suck Without You’, it seemed an appropriate time to have a look at the opposite end of the scale and give some love to a song with lyrics that don’t just deserve a place in the hearts of the Home Counties Brigade.

That song today is ‘Martha’ by Tom Waits.  Waits always said his songs fell primarily into two categories- ‘the Reapers and the Weepers’- and though this is a very broad generalisation of his oeuvre there is some truth in it.  The ‘Reapers’ were the songs where he gave his gravel pit of a voice room to breath- albums like Bone Machine, much of Blood Money, Mule Variations- and he could indeed sound like someone from down below (albeit one that you’d love to have a beer with).
      

The ‘Weepers’ are the other side of the coin; those slow, heartbreaking tales of people caught on the wrong side of the tracks, spending long lonely nights in bars. often by themselves.  His voice is a different beast altogether here; still crackly, but sympathetic, sad and struck down by a bourbon soaked barrel of the blues.  And foremost among these is ‘Martha’, a stunning first person account of a man calling his old High School girlfriend, the Martha of the title.


Opening with ‘operator number please/it’s been so many years/she remembers my old voice/ why I fight the tears’,  we quickly realise that the narrator is still in love with Martha, and that this is a story within a song, or (bear with me) a conversation within a story within a song.  Except it’s a conversation we are allowed to sit in on; a conference call for the heavy-hearted, if you will. Its achingly sad from the off, as Waits dripfeeds the listener more and more about their previous relationship; we don’t find out the timeframe of the narrators love until the end of the first verse where he sings ‘it’s been forty years or more/Now Martha please recall/Meet me out for coffee/Where we’ll talk about it all.’

The thrice repeated chorus is surely a lesson in the economy of lyrics, and how saying little is often much much more powerful as Waits recalls the lovers previous time together as ‘days of roses/of poetry and prose and Martha.’  His yearning for those days is tragic, and we get a glimpse of the narrators lifelong pain as he talks of how ‘they packed away their sorrows/ and saved them for a rainy day.’ The message being here that life has since been one long rainy day; surely that’s the most weep-worthy of situations?

As the song wends its sad way, the lyrics descends further and further into
the personal, starting with the narrator asking after Martha’s husband and kids
before revealing that he too got married.  Eventually, in the third verse,  we find out more about him as a lad where Waits sings that ‘I was always so impulsive/Guess that I still am/And all that really mattered then/ Was that I was a man.’ This hints at adolescent mistakes, perhaps infidelities, that hastened their parting and that he now with all of him regrets as he goes on to confess to what we already know with ‘Martha, Martha/I love you can’t you see.’

The final lines are a standalone non-rhyming couplet of ‘And I remember quiet evenings/ Trembling close to you.’  The quiet contented natures of these lines are a fitting sign-off, as Waits gives us real insight into the narrator’s tragic memories and how they are still fresh and vivid in his mind.



Throughout the arrangement is simple piano, gentle violin and some choral backing vocals towards the final verse and chorus.  An arrangement like this is designed to push the lyrics to the forefront, unlike Miss Clarkson and her awful brash, pop guitar where it appears to be trying desperately to drown out the nonsense spouting from her mouth.  'Martha' as a whole is a lesson in understatement, and how to tell a whole life story in a few lines.  In these four
and a bit minutes Waits has managed to tell us everything and life-defining about this man and how his, to an extent, is a life wasted and lost to heartbreak and enforced childish masculinity. 


Now, for such a mature, thoughtful lyric there would perhaps be an assumption
that Waits wrote 'Martha' in his latter years, from some degree of personal
experience. Surely it would have to? Incredibly this is very much not the case,
as it appeared on Waits’ first album Closing Time, released in 1973 when he was just twenty four. And do you know how old Kelly Clarkson is now? Twenty four as well. 


Vive le difference.    

Posted In Features, Mar 24 2009. Words - Tom