First Thursday's Just For Fun: Pasties and a G-String

Okay, yes I am doing two months in a row about music.

Wait... what's that? You thought this post was going to be about strippers or burlesque or something with a title like that? Shame on you for not having an encyclopedic memory of songs by Tom Waits - the subject of my just for fun post for this month. (I'll admit I don't have an encyclopedic memory myself, but my Tom Waits station on Pandora gets played more than any other I've created. So no, I'm not an authority, but I do have a deep and enduring passion for his music.)

Source

"Pasties and a G-String", the source of the title of this post, is one of my favorite cuts from TW's third album, Small Change.

"Step Right Up," (also from Small Change) TW's clever condemnation of Madison Avenue's tactics, is beyond brilliant. The music is fab, but this ditty also includes one of my favorite song lyrics of any song ever: "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away."



This is actually the second time this song has appeared on my blog, I love it that much. Even more, though, I love that the real video for "God's Away on Business" (from the 2002 album, Blood Money) is even weirder than the Cookie Monster/Tom Waits mashup I posted previously. Dancing with emus? Really?

As a finally share, here's "Jersey Girl." TW wrote this song with and about his future wife, and it's one of my favorite sappy, sentimental songs. It gets me every time.

Are these my favorites of his work? I don't know. Most days I'd cite "God's Away on Business" as a favorite, but sometimes I would probably name "Tom Traubert's Blues" or "Nighthawks at the Diner" or even "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis" as my favorite, or any of a dozen others depending on which ones I've heard recently, instead of the some of the songs above. There's just something about that too-many-cigarettes-and-too-much-whiskey sounding voice that always, ALWAYS works for me.


p.s. I love his acting, too. He's my favorite thing about Queens Logic (which I own on DVD because of TW) and I finally gave in and saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, despite the Heath Ledger sadness, when I found out Tom Waits was among the cast.