"Dog Door"
'It's a Wonderful Life' (Sparklehorse album), 2001
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My favorite line on “Dog Door” is “She got you coming through the dog door.”
That’s pretty much by default though. It’s the only line I can understand.
On the Sparklehorse collaboration “Dog Door,” first released on that artist’s 2001 album It’s a Wonderful Life and later resurrected for Tom’s own Orphans, Tom pushes distorted vocals to their breaking point. It’s not just like he’s singing through a bullhorn, as he often does in concert. It’s like he’s singing through a bullhorn which itself is being projected through another bullhorn. Maybe two or three more bullhorns in the chain too between Tom’s mouth and the microphone.
The funny thing is, part of Tom’s role on the song was to write the lyrics. Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous said that Tom’s kids liked his first album. Tom heard it through them, and the two began a correspondence. When the It’s a Wonderful Life album came out, Linkous told a Melbourne radio station:
“‘Dog Door’ was kind of an experiment because I had recorded a lot of 20 songs and erased most of them. But I really liked the way ‘Dog Door’ sounded but I couldn’t write a melody, lyrics and stuff for it. It’s not really a pop song, like verse-chorus-verse chorus, which all my songs kind of are, they can be deconstructed Bread songs. But I really liked the track and I was like ‘Man I’ll send you this and see if you can do anything with it.’ He called me and said ‘Come on out.’ So I flew up there and we put the vocals down and it was done. He also played piano on the hidden track right on the very end of the album.”
Interesting, in the album’s liner notes, Tom is also credited as playing “Big Seed Pod,” “Metal Things,” and, simply, “Train.” Everything is so distorted it’s hard to tell whether that actually means anything, or if it’s just a goof on the sort of things Tom Waits would play.
To me, “Dog Door” feels like a missed opportunity. A pretty cool song on paper, with Tom growling, beatboxing, hitting his high lonesome falsetto—all sorts of classic Tom moves—but distorted to the point that it’s an unpleasant listen. Even the lyrics, as transcribed from someone else’s cover here, seem pretty solid, but you can’t at all make them out.
I did find this terrific cover though, which makes it all worth it:
Thanks as always for these song commentaries! I played "Dog Door" in my Adult Ed Tom Waits class, and one student was a big Sparklehorse fan, so that was fun.
While I liked the attitude of the cover you presented, I think the Waits/Sparklehorse version is much more interesting. I wrote this about it: "the sinister bass line steers the song past the feedback and distortion, with Waits' falsetto as tour guide on this scary carnival ride."
And maybe I'm reaching here, but I thought there were several echoes in the lyrics to other Waits tunes. Obviously, there's the link to "Starving in the Belly of a Whale," but also lines reminiscent of "First Kiss" and "It's Over." But Waits pilfers his own catalogue quite a bit, so this isn't unusual.