Tom Waits- The Heart Of Saturday Night LP

Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing. The Heart of Saturday Night is the second studio album by singer and songwriter Tom Waits, originally released in 1974. The title song was written as a tribute to Jack Kerouac. The album cover is based on In the Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra. It is an illustration featuring a tired Tom Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona with his trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock music styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music. Waits' lyrics frequently present atmospheric portraits of grotesque, often seedy characters and places, although he has also shown a penchant for more conventional ballads. He has a cult following and has influenced subsequent songwriters despite having little radio or music video support.

• - Disc 1 -
• 1 New Coat of Paint
• 2 San Diego Serenade
• 3 Semi Suite
• 4 Shiver Me Timbers
• 5 Diamonds on My Windshield
• 6 (Looking for) the Heart of Saturday Night
• - Disc 2 -
• 1 Fumblin' with the Blues
• 2 Please Call Me, Baby
• 3 Depot, Depot
• 4 Drunk on the Moon
• 5 The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone's Pizza House)

If Closing Time, Tom Waits' debut album, consisted of love songs set in a late-night world of bars and neon signs, its follow-up, The Heart of Saturday Night, largely dispenses with the romance in favor of poetic depictions of the same setting. On "Diamonds on My Windshield" and "The Ghosts of Saturday Night," Waits doesn't even sing, instead reciting his verse rhythmically against bass and drums like a Beat hipster. Musically, the album contains the same mixture of folk, blues, and jazz as its predecessor, with producer Bones Howe occasionally bringing in an orchestra to underscore the loping melodies. Waits' songs are sometimes sketchier in addition to being more impersonal, but "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night" and "Semi Suite" are the equal of anything on Closing Time. Still, with lines such as "...the clouds are like headlines/Upon a new front page sky" and references to "a 24-hour moon" and "champagne stars," Waits' imagery is beginning to get florid, and in material this stylized, the danger of self-parody is always present. - William Ruhlmann, AllMusic.com