"After You Die"

'Bad as Me' bonus track, 2011

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Our alphabetical run through the Tom Waits catalog starts at the end. "After You Die" is the final song on his final album to date, Bad As Me. This is on the deluxe version, that is; the regular version ends with "New Year's Eve," another song about the end of one thing and the beginning of another. And I feel like Tom would appreciate the macabre nature of kicking off this project - and celebrating his birthday today - with "After You Die."

To be honest, I barely remembered "After You Die" existed, being a bonus track and all. So right off the bat this newsletter is serving its most selfish purpose: Re-introducing me to songs I didn't pay enough attention to the first time. Turns out, "After You Die" is as good as almost anything on the main album, a joyful cascade of words that don't mean all that much, but sound like a hell of a lot of fun to sing. For instance:

Like a big fool crawling 
Like a rig tool falling 
Like a back door squeaking 
Like a crack whore tweaking

Try saying that three times fast.

In an interview in The Observer, Tom was asked if the question posed in the chorus - "What's it like after you die?" - keeps him awake at nights. "Well, I guess," he replied. "But that song started out just as a riff, taking triple rhymes, batting them back and forth. 'Like a jail door closing, like a male whore dozing…' And so on."

Neither of those lines he quoted are in the actual song. Maybe “After You Die” is like "Hallelujah" where there are dozens of pages of discarded lyrics. Running out of time for the 10th anniversary box set, Tom…

Musically, the spooky guitar lines from Will Bernard give things an appropriately postmortem feel, as do the haunted moans Tom delivers in between verses. As often in Waits songs, the sounds he’s making with his voice matter as much as the actual words do. I particularly love that drawn-out pause in “Like a necktie flapping / Like a rich guuuuuuuuuuyyyy…clapping.”

So what does Tom actually think happens after you die? He answered that question - with total sincerity, I’m sure, just as he answers all interview questions (ha!) - in a 2004 interview with the short-lived UK literary magazine Zembla:

"I think you're born after you die. You go through a birth canal and you're born into another manifestation. Everything was alive once, right? Like Buckminster Fuller said, ‘Fire is nothing more than the sun unwinding itself from the wood.’ So perhaps we will be fire some day because the sun is in us waiting to be released."

Up next: Tom goes to Celebrity Rehab

PS. If you’re wondering “Who are you?” and “What’s he building in here?,” come on up to the About page.