second round game

(11) Kate Bush, “Moments of Pleasure”
held off
(14) Tom Waits, “Hold On”
86-55
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/14/26.

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Just Being Alive, It Can Really Hurt: cheryl graham on kate bush’s “moments of pleasure”

To be a Kate Bush fan in America in the 1990s was to be a lonely, long-suffering apologist waiting, seemingly in vain, for a new album. Before Stranger Things, before TikTok, before 3.1 billion streams on Spotify, Kate’s highest-charting single in the US, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” had peaked at number 22 in 1985. Though it was the song that would return her to the spotlight 40 years later, achieving a level of fame unimaginable when it was originally released, without a US tour or public appearances to support it, Kate’s meager foothold in the country almost slipped away. Her 1989 album, The Sensual World, made some noise on the alternative charts in this country, but by 1991, grunge was competing with heavy metal for supremacy, leaving the idiosyncratic British artist in its wake.
Kate Bush fandom wasn’t much different in the 80s. Which was okay. Kate was not for everyone. Or perhaps everyone just hadn’t caught up yet. She was weird. She was extra. Her 80s albums, The Dreaming and Hounds of Love, were esoteric and difficult, full of vocal histrionics, heavy on piano and otherworldly sounds. Not to mention the obscure literary references and what one reviewer called “off her trolley lyrics.” If you were prepared to spend time with the records, though, and willing to be taken wherever Kate wanted to lead, the rewards were abundant.
In the late 80s, if you found another person who knew the deep cuts, not just the one song, you’d found a kindred. A poet I worked—and sometimes slept—with was such a person. I was but one of the many women in her orbit, beguiled by her inscrutable quietude, absurdist sense of humor, and the tan lines criss-crossing her back. Her steadfast aversion to monogamy frustrated me, but our love of Kate Bush became our lingua franca. We’d leave lyrics scribbled on the chalkboard at work, cryptic messages for one another to find, and stay up nights scrutinizing every track. I once got through a busy shift at the coffeehouse by making an alphabetical list of every song in my head.
While our love for Kate was pure, it was not blind; we weren’t above criticism when it was warranted. That one slightly off note in the 1986 remake of “Wuthering Heights,” for example or, well, the whole idea of remaking the song in the first place. There were rules about which albums we could play at work (The Kick Inside and Never for Ever) and the ones reserved for late-night listening (The Dreaming, obviously). My poet friend, who incidentally was also named Kate, was naturally more of a lyrics person, while I was (and still am) someone for whom the music comes first. We drifted apart eventually, both of us settling into altered states. LSD for her; for me, graduate school in Ohio.
Then came the 90s, an altogether unforgiving decade, in which I found myself adrift after grad school with no career, no partner and, owing to my habit of pulling up stakes just as things were getting comfortable, few friends. When, in 1993, I learned there was a new Kate Bush album coming out, it felt like that alone could put things right. Though I listened to grunge, Britpop, hip-hop, R&B, and industrial music, none of it matched the singular genius of my musical touchstone. (Though, like many Kate Bush fans during the fallow years between albums, I clung to Tori Amos as a worthy stand-in.)
A woman I worked with that year, named Liz, had a friend who procured a leaked version of the forthcoming album’s first UK single, “Rubberband Girl.” The friend had gotten it from a guy in England who sent it to him via dial-up, a transmission that took all night to complete. He transferred the digital file to cassettes and distributed them to his circle of equally dedicated friends. Liz and I listened to this contraband several times on our lunch break, trying to decide if we liked it. It was different. For starters, it was very poppy, and—what’s this?—Rock guitar? Horns? A conventional song structure? When she vocalizes the stretching sound of the titular item in a dizzying outro, however, a flash of the old, oddball Kate came through. I was cautiously optimistic.
I bought the album the day it was released, of course. It was the first one Kate had recorded expressly for CD, a format that, unlike vinyl, cannot be cradled in your arms on the way home from the record store. I removed the CD from its tiny plastic bag, stripped the cellophane from the case, and eagerly placed it into my portable CD player. The album in question, The Red Shoes, was—how do I put this?—disappointing. There were flashes of the wacky brilliance I’d always loved (and I’m using “wacky” as the highest compliment here), but there were also quite a few head-scratchers. Where previous LPs had felt self-contained, with a unifying theme or concept, The Red Shoes was wildly inconsistent. Moreover, because it had been recorded on a digital console, the overall sound was brittle and cold, and contained glitchy artifacts that would later be contested and dissected on fan forums.
I was willing to entertain the notion that I was the problem. Maybe the album was really good, and it just happened to be released during a year in which I found it hard to feel joy. Maybe I just needed to spend more time with it. Or maybe I couldn’t like this album because I’d burdened it with the impossible task of changing my life.
I didn’t give up on it—how could I?—and there were quite a few songs that are just as good as anything on its predecessor, The Sensual World. Namely, the Madagascan rhythms of “Eat the Music”; the sensuous “Song of Solomon”; “Top of the City,” a heartsick ballad with an explosive chorus; “Lily,” more of an incantation than a song; and the frenetic fairytale of the title track. Then there is “Moments of Pleasure,” a deeply personal, elegiac song, full of memories and specters. Thirty years on, after countless listens, I still don’t know how I feel about it.

Every Old Sock Meets an Old Shoe

Sometime around the turn of the decade, Kate and longtime boyfriend, bass player, and engineer Del Palmer split up (romantically, that is—the two continued their musical collaboration). Around this same time, Kate’s mother, Hannah, fell ill with cancer. She would die before The Red Shoes was released. Michael Powell, the British director with whom Kate had become close, and whose 1948 film lends the album its name, died in 1990. Two of her closest collaborators, guitarist Alan Murphy and dancer Gary Hurst, both succumbed to AIDS in 1989 and 90, respectively. So it’s no wonder the songs on The Red Shoes are some of Kate’s most plainly personal.
I never harbored a fascination with Kate’s private life. It was as if my reverence for her precluded wanting to know anything about her; it would be like speculating what God gets up to all day. Not that I have anything against confessional singer-songwriters, but Kate’s songs were always bigger in scope. “Wuthering Heights,” her unlikely platinum-selling debut, was based on the Emily Brontë book (although, famously, a book she had not read, but had only seen the last ten minutes of the BBC miniseries on TV). “Breathing,” from 1980’s Never for Ever, spoke of nuclear holocaust from the POV of an unborn child. The songs on The Dreaming ran the gamut from Aboriginal creation myths to a robbery gone wrong, to Harry Houdini, to the Viet Cong. “Between a Man and a Woman,” from The Sensual World, sounds like it might provide some insight into Kate’s domestic life, but it turns out it was inspired by a line uttered by Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
Indeed, Kate has always resisted personal interpretations of her lyrics. In a contentious 1993 Sunday Times interview she says, “I’m here to talk about my work. My private life I don’t want to let go of. I need to keep it close and tender so that it is still my own.”
Nevertheless, there are songs on this record that are so intimate, I feel almost voyeuristic listening to them. They’re also bombastic and overwrought, with grandiose Hollywood-style orchestral arrangements in which the music hammers home the lyrical content in an entirely unnecessary and cringey way. If we consider her previous work as fiction and these songs as nonfiction, Kate would have been well-served by adhering to the memoirist’s edict, “when the action’s hot, write it cool.” I am so accustomed to Kate embodying various personae in her songs that when she herself seems to be the main character, it’s jarring.
“Moments of Pleasure” manages to sit at both ends of the spectrum. Some of the song’s lyrics are vivid, sensory, and specific to Kate alone, and for that reason, you’d think they’d be impossible to relate to. The chorus, on the other hand, is laughably prosaic: Just being alive, it can really hurt. Okay, sure.
Why is this song, then, one the Sunday Times called “compellingly sad,” and said “makes people cry for no apparent reason”? When the reporter asked Kate, “What was going on in your head” when she wrote the song, she replied, “Er, it's just a very personal song. It's to show just how precious life is and all those little moments that people give you. And that's how people stay alive, through your memories of them.”
The word “moment” bugs me. Specifically, when people say “a moment in time.” A moment is a unit of time; you wouldn’t say “an hour in time,” or “an instant in time.” Perhaps related to this bugbear is my distaste for the title “Moments of Pleasure.” It’s clunky (why not “Pleasurable Moments”?), utterly meaningless, and doesn’t sound particularly sad. It could be the name of an ad campaign for chocolates, or bubblebath, or some euphemistically-named sex aid. It’s the kind of thing I mean when I say Kate Bush fans sometimes have to be apologists. Like, yes, the words are kooky, and yes, the singing is screechy, but—you know what, I don’t care, you don’t have to like her.
Anyway, I looked up the etymology of “moment” and learned it originates from the Latin momentum, meaning movement. Some sources refer to the idea of a particle so small, it would incrementally shift the needle on a scale. It made me think about how moments turn into memories, and how memories are like a song that’s performed differently each time it’s played. An embellishment here and there, sped up or slowed down slightly, a note bent or missed. Moments that flicker through your mind like old movies, bringing the past alive in the present, and arising as insistently as the piano progression in this song.
 

Moments of Pleasure

Moment: A wide-angle scene of lying on a beach somewhere jump-cuts to diving off a rock into another…
Moment: The case of George the Wipe. (George was reportedly a tape-op who either erased [“wiped”] a reel by mistake, or the victim of a practical joke who was made to believe he’d done so.)
Moment: When something isn’t funny at all but you can’t stop laughing.
Moment: A happy reunion with an old friend, but you realize he isn’t well at all, and in the same…
Moment: You notice how the New York skyline looks just like mountains in the snow.
Moment: You remember something your mother used to say: “Every old sock meets an old shoe.” Ain’t that a great saying?
Moment: Gary, who you called “Bubba,” dancing down the aisle of a plane
Moment: Alan, nicknamed S’murph, playing his guitar refrain
Moment: You challenge Abbey Road engineer John Barratt, aka Teddy, to a chair-spinning contest
Moment: Lighting director Bill Duffield, while having a last look around the stage in the dark, falls to his death though an open panel in the floor. Hey there Bill, could you turn the lights up?

Here Come the Hills of Time

In 2011, Kate released Director’s Cut, a reassessment and remaking of several songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Seven tracks from the latter got updated vocals, new mixes, or were entirely rebuilt from scratch. “Moments of Pleasure” was completely re-recorded, restoring the analog warmth lost in the original digital production. In the new version, the instrumentation is reduced to just piano and voice, and though the piano part echoes the original, it’s no longer repetitive, but more languid and expressive. The original over-the-top chorus has been replaced by a chamber choir humming the melody, which adds a devotional element to the composition. The result is an arrangement with breathing room and a quiet solemnity—despite the presence of poor old George the Wipe. With a slower tempo and a lower key to accommodate Kate’s more mature voice, as well as the emotional depth gained over the ensuing 20 years, the song sounds finally, fully realized.
The chorus in the 1993 version starts These moments given are a gift from time, a phrase I originally thought had about as much substance as “moments of pleasure.” To be fair, the lyrics don't always read as great poetry when separated from the music. But then (thanks to the emotional depth gained over the ensuing 30 years), I realized all these years I’ve been misinterpreting both that line and the one that follows, Just let us try to give these moments back. I thought it meant to return them to their rightful owners. Which doesn’t really make sense, but as I mentioned, I’m more of a music person. Now, however, I think the lyric refers to gifts that are given unconsciously. Giving these moments back means reciprocating; we can only hope we give others “moments of pleasure” that keep us alive in their memories just as they have done for us.
I wonder whether Kate eliminated the chorus on the Director’s Cut version because it no longer fit sonically, or because it ceased to tell the whole story. Or both. I was sad in the 90s because (among other reasons) I hadn’t achieved certain personal and career milestones. Every day I dragged myself to a job I thought was beneath me, and came home to an empty apartment in the dark. But I had Liz, my coworker, and together we made toast in the break room and did the crossword puzzle and talked about music. I had Joel, and Wil, and Elizabeth, and others whose names have been lost to time. I had Kate, whose songs made me cry for no apparent reason, or for all the reasons, happy or sad, in the world. “I’m not talking about only pain or only ecstasy,” she once said. “The moments of pleasure couldn't exist without the sadness.”

Coda

Moment: Hiking on Mt. Lemmon, we find a rusty kitchen implement on the trail, which Kate (the poet) holds aloft like a drum major leading a parade. From that…
Moment on, the word “spatula” sends us spiraling into fits of laughter.
Moment: Listening to a bootleg cassette of Cathy (Kate) Bush’s teenage demos with Liz, and after a long, well-considered …
Moment, she says, “It makes you wonder what was going on in the Bush home.”
Moment: Kate Bush spinning in the air on video.
Moment: Liz riding her bike to work in the snow.
Moment: Kate (the poet) sews a parsnip to her sweatshirt and wears it for several days until the vegetable shrivels and falls off. It isn’t funny at all.

Cheryl Graham does not miss the 90s, but often misses that hair. She lives in Tucson and writes a Substack about mixtapes.

Crooked Little Heart: david turkel on “hold on” by tom waits

She’s out by the Riverside Motel. Now she’s by a ninety-nine-cent store. She must be walking. But this is hardly the night for it—it’s ten degrees below zero out there and getting colder by the minute and she doesn’t seem to have anywhere to go. She stops and shuts her eyes and she’s moving now, ever so subtly back and forth—you’d think she was dancing. She’s trying to remember a song that’s been stuck in her head but it’s too cold and the singer has to help her.
The song goes Hold on, hold on…. 
Kathleen Brennan—Tom Waits’s wife and chief collaborator since 1980—once said that her husband wrote two types of songs: grim reapers and grand weepers. I’m not sure into which of these categories she’d slot “Hold On”—a song that she co-wrote with him for his 1999 Grammy-winning album Mule Variations. It arguably possesses elements of both, but the song is neither grim nor grand by Waitsian standards. Most of the people I’ve talked to hear it as “sweet” and “pretty,” and none seem to share my concern for the protagonist’s fate at the end.
Certainly, in terms of both vocals and instrumentation, “Hold On” goes down easy. The Waits purist I was at the time of its release would have probably called it “Tom Waits for people who don’t actually like Tom Waits.” His voice is as normative as it gets—the song received a second Grammy nomination for “Best Male Rock Performance”—and there’s no bullhorn, conundrum or discordant guitar in the mix. Minus its length (a full verse was removed from the official video version for broadcast purposes), it’s a radio-friendly number. Given that kind of cursory listen, it unspools with a breezy romance. Lines like: “Well, the moon was gold, her hair like wind,” and “He gave her a dime store watch and a ring made from a spoon,” and “God bless your crooked little heart” weave a gentle spell. When he sings, “Come on, Jim,” before breaking into the first chorus, we’re excited for the ride ahead.
Waits himself thought the song “optimistic.” “I thought that was a good thing to say in a song,” he told music journalist Karen Schoemer at a diner in Monte Rio shortly after the album’s release. “Take my hand, stand right here, hold on. We wrote that together, Kathleen and I, and that felt good. Two people who are in love writing a song like that about being in love. That was good.”
     Barney Hoskyns, writer of the unauthorized biography Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, traces the song’s lineage through earlier iterations—like 1977’s “Burma Shave”—back to the true story of Waits’s cousin Corrinne, whom Waits said, “hitchhiked out and stood by this Foster Freeze on Prom Night. Got in a car with a guy who was just some juvenile delinquent, and he took her all the way to LA, where she eventually cracked up.”  The heroine of “Burma Shave” doesn’t make it that far—dying instead in a car wreck on the way to her destination. The young woman in “$29.00,” another song in this mold, crawls out of her finale “lucky to be alive,” having “only lost half a pint of blood, twenty-nine dollars and an alligator purse.”
About “Hold On,” Hoskyns wrote: “Here was another archetypal Waits moll, another variation on the cousin who’d split from Marysville all those years before. Except that this woman had a man who stood by her, who held on like Waits and Brennan had held on.”
Hoskyns is an experienced music writer, and his biography of Waits is as close to definitive as we get. It’s remarkable, therefore, that he offers such a superficial and inaccurate description of the most prominent song from Waits’s most commercially successful record. This may be due to the elements of the song I’ve already discussed which foreground its tenderness. But my gut tells me that, in ascribing to the song the story of a ride-or-die couple, Hoskyns makes the mistake of paying closer attention to Waits’s description of the songwriting process than to the lyrics themselves. If so, he’s overlooking a defining feature of the Waits songbook. As the artist told Terry Gross in a 2002 interview, “I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” This idea of a sweetly rendered nightmare, I would argue, gets closer to the heart of the song’s story than any attempt to find a Waits-Brennan level of fidelity in its characters. Otherwise, where is this man whom Hoskyns describes as standing by our moll?
Let’s see if we can find him.
In the first verse, a speaker, who addresses his listener as “son,” tells a story about a woman with “charcoal eyes and Monroe hips.” She left their straightlaced town of Monte Rio, California, with Hollywood dreams. She called out to someone named Jim to follow her, but it’s not clear if he did, or who this Jim even was. The companion in “Burma Shave” was just some stranger, after all, like the delinquent who picked up cousin Corinne.
As for the speaker, he may simply be the song’s narrator at this point, a folksy sort who calls everyone “son.” But if we’re to take him more literally, it’s possible that this is the protagonist’s father, explaining the situation to her little brother. Or maybe it’s an uncle, telling a young Tom Waits-proxy the story of his cousin. Though, to my mind, there’s too much non-familial longing in this smoldering image of eyes and hips. It’s hard not to think that the father in this verse is telling his son the story of the boy’s mother and of the day she left them both. A reversal, in this sense, of Waits’s own story, as it was his father Frank who left the family when Waits was ten.
Regardless it’s an odd launch if the song is meant to be, as Hoskyns suggests, the story of a couple who stick together through thick and thin. We’re occupying the vantage of those left behind. You can almost see the dust kicking up, as she—with or without Jim—peels away and recedes into the distance. It doesn’t feel like she’ll be coming back.
Sure enough, this speaker is nowhere to be found come verse two. The song abandons his first-person narration for a removed third person perspective that centers on an unnamed man and woman in low-rent surroundings. The woman still feels like our girl. But the man doesn’t quite strike me as Jim—he’s too naïve. He’s proposing marriage with a cheap ring. It’s quaint and cute, like something a kid would do. And his logic is like a kid’s too—he doesn’t understand why she’ll sleep with him, but she won’t marry him. For a second you think it might even be a flashback to some youthful courtship, but when she tells him, “Go ahead and call the cops, you don’t meet nice girls in coffeeshops” there’s nothing childish about that. Her suggestion is that he knew what he was getting into when they hooked up. It’s possible that she was working in a coffeeshop in Monte Rio then, already thinking of herself as a not-so-nice-girl. But I get the impression that she’s still older here and grown a little jaded. Her Hollywood dreams haven’t panned out and she’s been nighthawking—hitting those Hopper-esque diners late after the bars close. That’s where he picked her up. She says she still loves him, even tells him to hold on, but the way that she says it—“Sometimes there’s nothing left to do”—sure sounds like she’s letting go.
In the next verse, we move into direct address, as an unidentified speaker tells her, “God bless your crooked little heart.” It should be the most intimate shift in P.O.V. yet, but something’s off. She’s not actually there to hear his blessing—a fact which the line, “How I wish you were still here with me,” makes clear. He’s alone and missing everything about her, right down to that “broken China voice” of hers. Personally, I think he’s been drinking. “You build it up, you wreck it down. Then you burn your mansion to the ground,” he intones. Who else but a drunk says shit like that to an empty room?
Mule Variations’ song “House Where Nobody Lives,” offers a useful key to that line, when Waits sings, “If there’s love in a house, it’s a palace for sure.” That’s the kind of mansion he and Brennan are referencing—one transformed through love from an unremarkable dwelling into a place of opulence. The same kind of transformation that could have turned a spoon ring into a treasure. But we don’t have that sweet alchemy in this story—the ring was rejected, the house demolished.
In 1987, Tom Waits released Frank’s Wild Years—a concept album about a man named after his father who leaves home to hit the Big Time. We discover late in the record that Frank may not have gotten any further than East St. Louis. So, there’s a possible callback to that story in this verse of “Hold On,” when the man says, “St. Louis got the best of me.” What’s more, in Waits’s 1983 song “Frank’s Wild Years,” the Frank character literally sets fire to his suburban house, then sits in his car across the street drinking and laughing quietly to himself as it burns. All this is to say that not only do I disagree with Hoskyns that Waits and Brennan have given their moll a man to stick by her, I think the spirit of Frank pervades “Hold On”—these are not stick-together people, but a more restless sort; they’ve blown through each other’s lives chasing half-formed dreams. Maybe that’s what our moll meant they had to hold onto—not to one another but to those dreams? 
In the last lines of this third verse, however, there’s a telling shift. I hear the introduction of a new voice. It’s speaking again in direct address but with a different sense of purpose and connection. “Oh, there’s nothing left to keep you here,” it says, “But when you’re falling behind in this big, blue world. You’ve got to hold on.” Who’s speaking now, and who precisely are they speaking to? You could argue that the ex-lovers are talking over the phone in this scene, I suppose. But I sense a deeper divide.
More than that, the line “Oh, there’s nothing left to keep you here” bears repeating. It is, I think, one of the most heartbreaking lines of any song, especially a sweet and pretty one like this. I desperately hope that no one I’ve ever cared for should have to feel this way, that there’s nothing left keeping them in this “big, blue world.” It paints a picture of a loneliness so complete and profound that it shatters the illusion of dialogue. What’s different about the direct address this time around is that it breaks character, speaking now as the voice of the song itself. As such, it’s not speaking directly to our female protagonist—or only to her—but to us, the listener, as well. When there’s nothing left, it tells us, You’ve got to hold on.
This brings us back to the Riverside Motel and the song’s final verse. Back to the brutal cold and what feels like the end of a long, sordid journey. Who knows what Hoskyns was smoking when he spied someone out there with her, because it’s clear that this woman is alone with nowhere to go. You don’t reflect on how far away your “old hometown” is on a night like this if you’ve got any other options. She may even be working the streets at this point. Sometimes when I try to save her, that’s the dubious form her “salvation” takes—a car pulling up to the curb and rolling down its window for her to lean into. But when she shuts her eyes, I get worried that she’s not even holding out for that. And that’s when the shapeshifting perspective of the song turns yet again. Omniscient now, it moves into her head, and, by extension, into ours. Waits sings: “Inside your head there’s a record that’s playing a song called ‘Hold On.’”
You should try strumming along with it, if you’re able. It’s a simple enough song. Just four chords. In the verses they roll gently, like little wheels. All the chord changes happen mid-line, often mid-word, and this creates a soft undulation, as if the verse was a little boat bobbing up and down on a gentle current. With the chorus this strategy alters—the words becoming punctuated more directly by the changes. The second half of the chorus runs: (G) Hold on, (D) Take my hand, (A) I’m standing right here (you’ve gotta) (D) Hold on. It’s a small but noticeable shift that builds a structure, like the planks of an argument, lending the chorus its air of delicate but definite insistence. And this, I think, is the key to understanding Waits’s description of the song as a love song. Because it isn’t the story in the verses which hold that promise, but rather the song’s chorus. It has a life of its own. Though not until this final verse is that made explicit.  
I’ll be honest, sometimes it bothers me when songs get self-reflexive like this. As when, late in Don McLean’s interminable “American Pie,” everyone suddenly joins in on the chorus—How did they all learn the words of this song you just wrote, Don McLean??? But that’s not what’s happening with “Hold On.” I’m willing to bet that you have that room in your head too, the room where this song is playing on repeat. You may sing it differently, and the verses themselves may be different, but the words of the chorus are the same. I know I have it. Truth be told, I’ve spent more time in there this last year than ever before. Hold on in constant rotation. It plays for friends and loved ones, for communities, for my country. Staring dumbstruck at the news, I sing it to myself on a daily basis. My reasons are not as dark as hers—the woman in our song—nor as dire as so many others’ right now. I’m indoors as I write this, for starters. I’m warm. The person I love more than anyone in the whole world is close by and she loves me back. Though it’s almost too much to say that, isn’t it? I feel so impossibly lucky to be able to say that. So aware of this life’s precarity and of my own track record over the years for building things up just to wreck them down.
This, I understand, is why this Waits-Brennan “song about being in love” takes the shape that it does. Waits never meant to suggest that they were telling their own story in writing “Hold On.” The “good thing” that I think he’s referring to—the optimism which the song represents for him—is that they wrote it together, still holding on and being held. They sing the chorus for and to one another, but they’re not celebrating their love in the verses so much as offering a cautionary tale. The song, in this sense, is a prayer that those who reach for those words will be able to hear them, even on their coldest, loneliest nights.
Waits’s penchant for “beautiful melodies telling me terrible things” is certainly one reason why a cursory listen to “Hold On” might seem to support an interpretation of it as a sweet and pretty little love song. But I think he offered a more telling quote in his 2011 Fresh Air interview for the album Bad as Me, responding to Gross’s suggestion that his song “Last Leaf on the Tree” was a metaphor for death:

Well, I don’t know, you could say it’s a metaphor for death. Or you could say it’s really a song about the last leaf on a tree, you know? Because I did see a tree out in my yard that had one leaf left on it. And I…looked at that leaf and I said, ‘Hang on, buddy. If you hang on you can make it to the next season. If you can make it to the next one, you might be here next year greeting all the new ones. Hang on.’

I finally got to see Waits perform the year of Mule Variations. It was his first tour in twelve years. That period covered my entire history with the man—from a suburban high school student hearing him for the first time on the radio at the Fotomat where I worked, to a twenty-nine-year-old who had not yet figured out the difference (and distance) between the singer and his songs. I sported a catfish mustache and green-tinted prescription aviators, drove a 1971 Mach One and co-owned a roach-infested dive bar. Fittingly, as much as I’d looked forward to the concert, I stepped out mid-show to get a whiskey.
“You just missed Keith Richards,” the bartender told me, as I listened to the familiar sounds of “Hold On”—its pensive guitars and lush shaker—striking up in the auditorium. Mule Variations was Waits’s first record in six years, and the first of his discography that struck me as a step backwards. I was having a hard time accepting the idea of Tom Waits as the mainstream figure he seemed to have become in the interim. But I was also going through a breakup then, and I felt a resonance with “Hold On” that endeared me to it. It made me think of my own “California trip” at age twenty, of the dime store trinkets I’d bestowed and mansions I’d torched. In its own small way, “Hold On” gave me the cool suspicion that I was becoming less of a Tom Waits fan and more a character from one of his songs.
But when I tried to head back inside, I was told by security that I’d have to wait until the song was over to get to my seat. I moved closer to the doors and the two men flanking them shifted their weight. “I’m just trying to hear the song,” I told them. And that’s how I listened to it—out by the security, staring at the closed double doors to the auditorium, straining after every syllable. That’s when I finally heard the song. All these years later, it’s the only song from that show that I remember. 

This is the author in 1999, at a going away party in Hell (the bar) for his friend Goodie, who was leaving Chapel Hill to make “that California trip.”