"Circus"
'Real Gone', 2004
Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info here and sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox:
Hey! Before we get to today’s song, a plug: Cover Me, the cover songs blog I edit, just ran The 50 Best Tom Waits Covers Ever, in honor of Closing Time turning 50 last month. Some of the big covers you’ll know, mixed in with a ton of weirdo obscurities. Check it out!
A few months ago I got playing around with A.I. art. If you’re not familiar, a variety of artificial-intelligence tools can now generate original artwork from a given prompt in a manner of seconds. The results are amazing – and often unhinged. For example, something so “intelligent” never seems to know how many fingers a person has.
After playing around a bit, I landed on a fun way to use tools: Asking them to depict song lyrics. It works best with lines containing strong images. For instance, I did a whole Twitter thread sharing the A.I. art platform’s Midjourney’s interpretation of every verse of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row”:
Tom has no shortage of songs that I thought would be fun for this. One song – well, a spoken-word piece really – that’s jam-packed with such weird imagery is “Circus,” off Real Gone. Every single verse introduces new oddball characters, from Mighty Tiny on the saw to Horse Face Ethel and her Marvelous Pigs in Satin. So I had Midjourney create depictions of the “Circus” characters.
You’ll notice the platform fixates on certain details from the lyrics while entirely ignoring others. “Yodeling Elaine” isn’t yodeling. “One-Eyed Myra” has two eyes. Etc. But the fact that these creations are wildly imperfect is, to me, part of the charm. The A.I. fundamentally doesn’t understand what a lyric is, so it just builds some surreal, creepy, and amazing images from a couple choice details. They feel very Waits-ian, even if the specifics are off. (And yes, it remains entirely incapable of drawing a finger properly.)
So here are the characters in “Circus,” as depicted by Midjourney. I’ve pasted the lyric snippet I inputted above the piece of art the A.I. spit out.
We put up our tent on a dark green knoll
Outside of town by the train tracks and a seagull dump
Topping the bill was Horse Face Ethel and her Marvelous Pigs in Satin
One-eyed Myra, the queen of the galley
Who trained the ostrich and the camels
She looked at me squinty with her one good eye
In a Roy Orbison t-shirt as she bottle fed an Orangutan named Tripod
Then there was Yodeling Elaine, the Queen of the Air
Who wore a dollar-sign medallion
And she had a tiny bubble of spittle around her nostril
And a little rusty tear
For she had lassoed and lost another tipsy sailor
Mighty Tiny on the saw
And he threw his head back with a mouth full of gold teeth
Me and Molly Hoey drank Pruno and Kool-Aid
She had a tattoo gun made out of a cassette motor and a guitar string
She soaked a hanky in Three Roses and rubbed it on the spot
And drew a rickety heart and a bent arrow and it hurt like hell
Funeral Wells spun Poodle Murphy on the target
As he threw his hardware
Only once in Sheboygan did he miss at a matinee on Diamond Pier
And she'd never let him forget it
Excellent. I shared this with a fellow Tom fan, describing it as "appropriately weird".