"Everything Goes to Hell"

'Blood Money', 2002

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:

Like all the songs on Blood Money, “Everything Goes to Hell” was originally written for the 2000 play Woyzeck, Tom Waits’ third collaboration with director Robert Wilson (after The Black Rider and Alice). Waits had tried to worm out of doing it at first, calling the plot “pretty morose and turgid.” Here’s the summary from the playbill:

Woyzeck is the story of a poor soldier who tries to survive in spite of the daily humiliations of life. In order to support his wife Marie and her little son he is forced to sell his body to scientific experiments. He pays with his mind. Whereas Woyzeck’s love for Marie is great and devoted, the money he can offer her is little and insufficient, and when he finds himself defeated by the flashy and fiery drum major, his worn out faith in the justice of life crackles. Woyzeck seeks comfort in the arms of another woman, gets drunk and suddenly finds himself holding a bloody knife. In front of him lies Marie’s dead body. Woyzeck is the story of a man’s gradual degradation; of an evil life trap between nature and nurture; of losing the woman you love and the meaning of life.

“Everything Goes to Hell” comes at the part I put in bold, which is the end of the first act. The drum major seduces his wife Marie, hastening the titular Woyzeck’s descent into madness and murder. The song was performed as a duet between Marie and the drum major. It’s basically a nihilist ode to infidelity—why bother doing the right thing?

To me, this makes what I ultimately think is one of Blood Money’s lesser songs a little more interesting. For one, the lyrics make more sense as a duet than a solo piece. As originally envisioned, the woman, Marie, sings the first verse:

Why be sweet, why be careful, why be kind?
A man has only one thing on his mind
Why ask politely, why go lightly, why say please?
They only want to get you on your knees
[chorus]

And then the man, the drum major, responds with the second verse:

Laissez-faire mi amour, ce la vie
Shall I return to shore or swim back out to sea?
The world don’t care what a soldier does in town
It’s all hanging in the windows by the pound
[chorus]

Sadly, there’s no video of this production to see the song as originally intended. But I did find a couple still photos, and an audio recording of this version. So you can combine these and try to imagine what it might have looked like in the play.

Tom hasn’t said much about the song, nor ever performed it live, which makes me wonder if he feels the same way. I think the album’s preceding track, “Misery Is the River of the World,” does the same thing quite a bit more memorably. That’s the trouble with taking a bunch of songs written for one purpose out of their original context. It works more often than not on Tom’s three albums taken from plays, but some songs, like this one, were probably more effective in their original form.