"Day After Tomorrow"

'Real Gone', 2004

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“Day After Tomorrow” is the first Tom Waits song that Joan Baez covered.

I mention that not just to shout out her version (which is quite good), but to point out it’s the rare Tom Waits song that sounds like something Joan Baez would cover. You don’t think of Tom Waits as a protest singer, but, between this and songs like “Road to Peace” and "Hell Broke Luce,” he kind of became one in the 2000s. The Iraq War stirred something in him, and it looms over the entire Real Gone album.

He explained the song’s origins in an interview with Time Out London. Now, if you’ve been reading the newsletter, you know that often a Tom Waits explanation of a song will wacky or weird. This one is not. Just like the song itself, it’s unusually straightforward and personal:

“Well, I read the papers and all that and I got kids who are draft age and I guess you get to a point where if you say nothing that becomes a political statement too. I feel like my job is to maybe put a human face on the war. The fact that we aren't seeing what's really happening. They're very careful about what they allow to come home. If you saw the dead babies and houses on fire, it would change how people feel, but that's why they're so careful. Certain things are on a need-to-know basis, that's the part I hate. It's kind of like we're livestock who are being fed.”

“I feel like my job is to maybe put a human face on the war” reads like a statement of purpose for “Day After Tomorrow.”

Around the time Real Gone came out, there was a series of high-profile compilations called Rock Against Bush. They featured extremely on-the-nose songs with titles like “No W” (Ministry) and "The Expatriate Act" (World/Inferno Friendship Society). They fit right in with other then-popular protest tunes like “American Idiot” (Green Day) or “When the President Talks to God” (Bright Eyes).

Those are all what Bob Dylan would have disdainfully called “finger-pointing” songs. “Day After Tomorrow” skips the capital-p Politics, but it’s no less pointed. Sung from the point of view of a soldier writing a letter back home on his 21st birthday, it features some of the most powerful lyrics in his entire catalog. This verse in particular is a jaw-dropper:

You can't deny, the other side
Don't want to die anymore then we do
What I'm trying to say is don't they pray
To the same god that we do?
And tell me how does god choose?
Whose prayers does he refuse?
Who turns the wheel?
Who throws the dice?
On the day after tomorrow

You can see why Joan Baez felt moved enough to cover it. And clearly Tom considered it something special too. When he performed on The Daily Show at Jon Stewart’s personal request (the show didn’t usually have musical performances), even though he was ostensibly promoting Orphans, he performed the two-year-old “Day After Tomorrow”:

A true crime to roll the credits over that.