Tom Traubert's Blues

“Tom Traubert’s Blues” is Tom Waits at his most openly heartbroken — an orchestral ballad that quotes “Waltzing Matilda” in the chorus and walks an American drunk through a foreign city where no one knows his name. The strings are lush, the piano is careful, and Waits’s voice already sounds like it has decades of grief in it even though he was twenty-six when he recorded it.

The song is about the specific shame and grief of having blown your life up in a way only you can fully inventory. The person being grieved is technically the self he is becoming — the self who did this, who is doing this, who cannot seem to stop. Listen to it when the person you have to mourn is you.