"Face to the Highway"

'Bad As Me', 2011

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Was Tom Waits trying to tell us that Bad As Me would be his final record?

In an interview with Terry Gross promoting the album, she asked him about “Face to the Highway.” He responded:

There’s a lot of going-away songs on the record, and this is definitely one of those. A theme doesn’t really begin when you begin. It usually forms later. And now I look back on it - and Kathleen felt, too - that the songs have a lot of going away, let’s go get lost…

“I’m going away,” he sings over and over again on “Face to the Highway.” Could it have been any clearer?

In fact, I had in my head that this was the closing track on Bad As Me. It feels like a closing track. He brings back so many of his classic images: Prisons, plows, diamonds, oceans, the devil. But it’s only track five. The first half of the album. Even “Last Leaf,” which feels even more like a closing song—Willie Nelson sings it onstage every night now, and the symbolism of a 92-year-old singing “I’m the last leaf on the tree” is lost on no one—isn’t the final track.

Tom has, thankfully, not entirely gone away. He still pops up as a scene-stealing minor character in a movie every couple years, and appears in the occasional documentary. He’s made very sporadic live appearances at tributes to friends and benefits. He dropped a random Mule Variations outtake. But ever since Bad As Me, he has, for the most part, turned his face to the highway and turned his back on us.