dear tom waits,

so.................. i'm pretty much in love with you right now.



i have a little bit of an obsessive personality. i may be understating that a little. it's not important. the point is that right now, you are the object of my fixation.

i watched a terrible movie last week, tom. it was so terrible that i can't even bring myself to name it. however, during the opening credits was a song of yours ("please call me, baby") that i remember liking quite a bit when this movie was popular. i re-wound (yes, i still use a vcr) the movie a few times just to hear this song, and i suddenly remembered that i had three of your albums sitting on my computer. a fiending friend of mine had burned them for me, and i had listened to them each once. i scrambled to my computer, abandoning the movie, and threw the albums onto my ipod. the first song that came up was "pasties and a g-string," which i immediately put into my weekly 5 on wednesday. Ghey fed my obsession by sending me another one of your albums, and i knew that i wouldn't listen to much else for awhile.

you're one of those artists that would severely intimidate me, were i ever to meet you in real life. i'd love to sit and have a cigarette and a drink with you, but in reality, i think i wouldn't be of any interest to you unless i showed you my tits or kept you consistently intoxicated. in all honesty, i would probably do both of these things. just don't tell anyone that.

yours is the kind of music that makes me wonder about you and who you are and why you write songs like this. i imagine you shutting yourself in a room, smoking cigarettes, drinking hard alcohol and sitting around, lonely and dejected. it makes me want to do the same: sit in my cigarette smoke, isolated, drunk, and depressed. i don't know if i can do that though, tom, because when i get drunk, i get giggly. giggly doesn't exactly fit with your mood. i can't see myself listening to "starving in the belly of the whale" and giggling through it. (even my blue/snowflake layout is too happy and cheery for this. i'm thinking of changing it again, tom, just for you.)

i like that you clear your throat when you narrate your morbidly amusing stories ("frank's wild years"). i like that even your instrumental creep-fests sound like you ("knife chase"). i like that you sample "as time goes by" ("bad liver and a broken heart") and "waltzing matilda" ("tom traubert's blues") and make them break my heart. i love how you can go from a blues song ("christmas card from a hooker in minneapolis") to a jazz song dripping with a beatnik narrative ("the one that got away") to a wholly depressing ballad ("the piano has been drinking [not me]") to something unbelievably creepy ("god's away on business"). chameleons, tom, keep things interesting. you have your own unique style that can be identified within the first five seconds of the song, but everything is so different.

so yes, i am obsessed and in love with you right now. next week, perhaps not so much, because i am a fickle young girl with a wandering eye and a lust for something new... but i won't ever lose my love for you.

love,
anniemosity.com

ps: i loved you in "mystery men," one of my favorite movies of all time. and i'll blog about that sometime, too.

(if you are interested in obtaining more tom waits albums, you can purchase blood money, rain dogs, small change (my personal favorite), swordfishtrombones, or blue valentine. yes, he has more, but these are the only ones i am familiar with in any way. talk to me to find out which one is right for you.)