I am not always (or even often) a Tom Waits fan, but "Day After Tomorrow," the final cut off the
Body of War companion cd, is a song of unquestionable beauty and power, performed by Waits with an unaccustomed lyricism and grace (the voice on the accompanying video is much more growly).
Having fallen utterly under the spell of this song, I went looking for its provenance and found the following on Wikipedia:
Real Gone, Waits' first non-theatrical studio album since Mule Variations five years previous, was released in 2004. It is Waits' only album to date to feature absolutely no piano on any of its tracks. Waits beatboxes on the opening track, "Top of the Hill", and most of the album's songs begin with Waits' "vocal percussion" improvisations. It is also more rock-oriented, with less blues influence than he has previously demonstrated, and it contains an explicitly political song — a first for Waits. In the album-closing "The Day After Tomorrow" he adopts the persona of a soldier writing home that he is disillusioned with war and is thankful to be leaving. The song does not mention the Iraq war specifically, and, as Tom Moon writes, "it could be the voice of a Civil War soldier singing a lonesome late-night dirge." Waits himself does describe the song as something of an "elliptical" protest song about the Iraqi invasion, however. Thom Jurek describes "The Day After Tomorrow" as "one of the most insightful and understated anti-war songs to have been written in decades. It contains not a hint of banality or sentiment in its folksy articulation."
R. Christgau of the
Village Voice describes
Real Gone as:
Shtick fights funk to the death, yielding both a circus spiel with some laughs in it and a battlefield habanera worthy of Motorhead ("Hoist That Rag," "Top of the Hill").
I got your letter today
And I miss you all so much, here
I can't wait to see you all
And I'm counting the days, dear
I still believe that there's gold
At the end of the world
And I'll come home
To Illinois
On the day after tomorrow
It is so hard
And it's cold here
And I'm tired of taking orders
And I miss old Rockford town
Up by the Wisconsin border
But I miss you won't believe
Shoveling snow and raking leaves
And my plane will touch tomorrow
On the day after tomorrow
I close my eyes
Every night
And I dream that I can hold you
They fill us full of lies
Everyone buys
About what it means to be a soldier
I still don't know how I'm supposed to feel
About all the blood that's been spilled
Look out on the street
Get me back home
On the day after tomorrow
You can't deny
The other side
Don't want to die
Any more than we do
What I'm trying to say,
Is don't they pray
To the same God that we do?
Tell me, how does God choose?
Whose prayers does he refuse?
Who turns the wheel?
And who throws the dice
On the day after tomorrow?
Mmmmmmm...
I'm not fighting
For justice
I am not fighting
For freedom
I am fighting
For my life
And another day
In the world here
I just do what I've been told
You're just the gravel on the road
And the one's that are lucky
One's come home
On the day after tomorrow
And the summer
It too will fade
And with it comes the winter's frost, dear
And I know we too are made
Of all the things that we have lost here
I'll be twenty-one today
I've been saving all my pay
And my plane will touch down
On the day after tomorrow
And my plane it will touch down
On the day after tomorrow
Posted on 03/23/2008
Tags: body of war, tom waits, folk
My Trusted MOGs
You can't get much better than Tom Waits. Anytime....anytime....and this is one I hadn't heard before. Mmmmmm.
My Trusted MOGs
nice! there's not much by tom waits that i don't like. i love how the lyrics of this song aren't lofty or idealistic, just very simply human. i don't know what it is about tom, but with certain songs he can make me completely at peace with life and death, like this one, "martha" and "time."
My Trusted MOGs
Great lyrics!