One in the Chamber: Anywhere I Lay My Head
Exposing the multitude of truly great songs out there, one song at a time…
Anywhere I Lay My Head
Rain Dogs
Tom Waits, 1985
There’s a great line in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume 1, where he’s talking about American poetry: ”There was a letter from Archibald MacLeish waiting for me on the table. MacLeish, Poet Laureate of America – one of them. Carl Sandburg, poet of the prairie and the city, and Robert Frost, the poet of dark meditations were others. MacLeish was the poet of the night stones and the quick earth. These three were the Yeats, Browning, and Shelley of the new world, were gigantic figures, had defined the landscape of twentieth-century America.”
Whether it happens in threes or not, art lends itself to such characterizations. Though they may not all turn out to be Sandburgs or Frosts, artists tend to rise monolithic from their surroundings in ways and at times that allow them singular identities – often in the context of each other.
Tom Waits, and Dylan himself, are like that. Dylan, poet laureate of the old America, and Waits, the poet laureate of urban love and grit.
Waits’ music always seems to come from a place of kinship with the city’s downtrodden – even when he’s not writing about literal cities or literal downtrodden-ness, their forms are always hanging around. 1985′s Rain Dogs is his great paean to those forms, and it wraps up with “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” a short, effective song that closes the album up with a musical and lyrical mediation on what makes the Waitsian city dweller so worth hearing about.
After all, that’s one of the great questions about Waits: much of his work hangs on the idea that he’s describing characters that we care about and relate to, while at the same time, it feels like he only ever describes their blemishes and tribulations. He seems to search for the nobility in the most ignoble of places, people, and circumstances.
“Anywhere I Lay My Head,” with its refrain, “Anywhere I’m gonna lay my head, I’m gonna call my home” succeeds as a song, and as an exercise in this sort of understanding, because it is a work of dualities. Waits half screams, half sings the opening lines “My head is spinning round/my heart is in my shoes,” in a voice that isn’t quite angry or anguished. You think it’s language of pain until the verse continues, and you get first to “She’s laughing in her sleeve, boys/I can feel it in my bones” and then to the refrain, at which point you start to suspect it’s perhaps more defensive than anything else. It’s the old Waits’ trope: ”you only think there’s something wrong with my situation because you’re only observing it.”
Somehow, Waits maintains the scream-singing while being backed by a plaintive horn arrangement. Or rather, it might be a plaintive horn arrangement – that is, if its not a prelude that’s about to break through dark clouds. You could almost hear it being part of a religious piece, the Spirit descending as a dove.
The song is only two short verses. The second is like the first in that the sad images – pockets that used to be filled with gold, cold wind – are negated by the fact that “the world is upside down;” things aren’t right anyway. The refrain after this second verse is extended, and this time Waits sings:
Well I don’t need anybody, because I learned, I learned to be alone
Well I said anywhere, anywhere, anywhere I lay my head, boys
Well I gonna call my home
It’s an interesting way to end an album. When you hear it, you think it has a lot to do with the idea that “home is where the heart is.” But I think it’s different. I think it subverts the idea of home. It posits that “home” itself is an ambiguous notion, and that this is why the gamblers and drunkards and pimps and prostitutes and down-on-their-luck citizens of Waits’ songs are beautiful.
People are always trying to find “home.” And it seems that most of the pity we have for others comes from situations where we think that “home” is something that we have that they don’t. It’s this paradigm that leads us to look at Waits’ characters (and their real-life counterparts) as the dregs of what the city has to offer. We think that because we’ve got a roof over our heads or a well-paying job or a lack of obvious problems that we’ve found a home. But while home may be where the heart is, or may be the roof over our heads, it might also be the streets, or the other disheveled customers at the bar, or the under-arch of a bridge.
What Waits’ seems to say, in fact, is that home might just be knowing oneself. Not needing anybody. Learning to be alone. If you know yourself, loneliness (life, existence?) isn’t happy or sad. It just is.
The coda of the song is a jaunty little number from the horns. True to form, it feels happier, but you start to suspect that that feeling comes purely from the fact that the tempo is considerably higher. When you listen harder, it’s actually kind of a sad piece, because it feels like something’s leaving. Ultimately, it seems to be just as fitting to the rain dog sleeping in the archway as to the couple waltz-walking across the plaza, hand in hand. It can be both because in either case, the people know where they belong.
