Tom Waits With Keith Richards, "Last Leaf" (And Flowers And Roots)

“It was a tree, and there was one leaf left on the tree, and I wondered: ‘Wow, if you can make it through winter, you may be here until next year. Wouldn’t that be great, if you were just the only guy that hung on?’ I guess you could say everything’s a metaphor for everything else, but sometimes it’s just what it is. It’s just what it’s about — about a tree.”
 — Tomorrow is a day to celebrate, in that Tom Waits will release Bad As Me, his first new album in seven years.If you missed the interview with him in yesterday’s Times, it’s full of his inimitable charm

. The album apparently features a full six songs recorded with his old friend Keith Richards, including the wonderful, skeletal, one above — which was played on one of the 600 guitars Waits told Pitchfork Keith brought to the session, and is perfect perfect for this time of year. Metaphor or not, it’s a familiar theme for them both.

“If you break open a song, you’ll find the eggs of other songs,” Waits said to Sasha Frere-Jones in this week’s New Yorker (subscription required, as usual.) “Last Leaf” is sort of a more defiant take on ideas Waits wrote about in a pair songs from his Black Rider album from 1993. The bone-chilling “November,” which whistles with theremin and ends with one of my all-time favorite insults, “Go away you rainsnout/Go away, blow your brains out.” And the very similarly titled, “The Last Rose of Summer.”

I liked how Waits chose roses, in the Pitchfork interview, as the hypothetical theme of a set list Bob Dylan might play on his Sirius radio show. Waits, like many songwriters, writes about roses a lot. But after that last rose of summer does finally die, who will put a rose on its grave?

Maybe Keith?

Here is an amazing video that I’d never seen before of Keith bringing Waits around backstage at a Stones concert (in what would seem to be the ‘90s?) It’s a little bit uncomfortable, in that Ron Wood seems to be very high, and somewhat aggressive, and appears to offer Waits cocaine, which he declines. And Joe Elliott from Def Leppard is there, too. And producer Don Was.

Keith and Waits first worked together on Waits’s Rain Dogs album in 1985. Their voices sound terrific together. (The video below shows a blank screen while the music plays. Which is maybe an intentional nod to the song’s title? God, it’s such a great song.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZGIK990m-A

And in the way that that stubborn last leaf they’re singing in the voice of nowadays hangs on like a vestigial tail, it’s much like “That Feel” from Waits’ 1992, which is, as they say, harder to get rid of than tattoos.