Song of the Decade: Tom Waits - Barcarolle

"Barcarolle" by Tom Waits (2002)

Trying to pick one song as the aughts' best is a fool's task: for every song a critic chooses, at least one reader will likely wonder why the hell the writer made that bizarre selection. Setting all this aside, the criteria I used was simple: of all the songs I heard this decade, Tom Waits' "Barcarolle" is the only one that I can still listen to at any time, in any mood, at any place and never even become momentarily bored or underwhelmed.

At first glance (hell, even at second and third glance) "Barcarolle" is an unlikely candidate for this feature. The song didn't define the decade in any appreciable way, nor did it bend, reshape, or obliterate any genres. It wasn't created against the backdrop of the past 10 years' key events - 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a crippled economy - and didn't capture the bleakness and dread that defined most of this fucked up Bush-Cheney debacle of a decade. Even in the Tom Waits catalog the song is routinely dismissed as a decent song and not much more. Except for a few performances in 1992's coolly-received play Alice, Waits didn't get around to releasing it until 2002's album of the same name, and even then it was tucked away toward the end of the record. Still, the song carries with it a beauty and fragility that was rarely matched throughout the decade.

The song, like most tracks from Alice, takes as its subject the devotion/illicit obsession Lewis Carroll carries around for the young Alice Liddell. It forgoes the vocal barking and musical clang usually associated with the musician in favor a beautifully subtle approach. The arrangement is wonderfully understated and among the most evocative Waits has recorded; a perfect blend of bass, piano, violin, and saxophone, each instrument is used to evoke a definite mood. Waits' vocals are likewise restrained, with none of the lunatic wailing that has sometimes bordered on self-parody.

In addition to the song's larger themes of devotion and obsession, "Barcarolle" is a moving rumination on mortality and aging. The idealized girl "skating on the ice/ In a glass in the hands of a man/ That she kissed on the train" will be young but for a moment, a truth the older narrator has already discovered but of which the girl seems naively unaware. Set against images that surface in Waits' songs like clockwork, time passes indifferently and the simple joys of youth give way to the effects of time: "...the branches bend down/ To the ground here to swing on/ I'm lost in the blond summer grass/ And the train whistle blows/ And the carnival goes/ Till there's only the tickets and crows here/ And the grass will all grow back."

With an arrangement that could soften even the most jaded heart, "Barcarolle" offers a poetic take on life's fleeting nature and little tragedies. Time moves on, with or without us, it suggests, with a steady indifference. It's also, quite simply, the one song from this decade I'd choose to listen to above all others. - Eric Dennis