"Anywhere I Lay My Head"

'Rain Dogs', 1985

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Here's my hottest take of the newsletter so far: Scarlett Johansson's 2008 Tom Waits covers record Anywhere I Lay My Head is terrific. This is not my first time saying this - I wrote an article defending it eleven years ago - but apparently this opinion has not been widely adopted. On the rare occasions where I see the album mentioned at all, it is not positive.

And the title track is one of the album’s highlights. Johansson's voice is enough of a blank slate to carry the tune over Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio's whimsical electronic-orchestral production, without hiding or distracting from the beautiful melody. If you haven't heard it, or if the "Scarlett Johansson" factor distracted you, pretend this is some indie-pop darling - it actually reminds me of actual indie-pop darlings Mates of State's Waits-including covers record - and give it another shot:

Compare that to Tom's Rain Dogs original up top. His recording is the definition of "acquired taste." If you're reading this, I'm assuming you have acquired it, but you can probably imagine a time when you hadn't. I certainly can: In college I downloaded Rain Dogs off the intra-campus server and made it exactly halfway through track number two, "Clap Hands," before deciding this Tom Waits guy was not for me. It took a few years for me to give him another shot.

"Anywhere I Lay My Head" is a broadly accessible song made broadly inaccessible in Tom's bellowing performance. His performance style is, of course, one of the appeals of Tom’s music for fans, but I find nothing wrong with artists more palatable to the general public making his songs popular (I’m sure a decent chunk of Tom’s bank account come from that). In a more just world, a cover like Johansson's would have made “Anywhere I Lay My Head” a hit and driven more people back to Tom's weirder original. It could have been another "Downtown Train" or "Ol' 55" - a popular cover that draws eyerolls from existing fans, maybe, but guides more people down the first steps of the path that leads to Tom. But Scarlett’s album was roundly panned and, thus far, my efforts to rehabilitate its reputation have been for naught. And so "Anywhere I Lay My Head" remains an obscure song to most people. It deserves far better.

PS. The Gaslight Anthem do a good version too, closer to Waits musically but with Brian Fallon's gruff Jersey twang:

Coming up next: Tom rents an apartment near the diner