I remember reading it and agreeing with every word. I don't mind people liking Mr sexy's version, no issue with him covering it either to a certain extent as it's a great tune. It's when people start believing it to be a better version, or that Waits 'can't sing', that's when you have that 'Trump' moment, the moment you think 'this has to be a bad dream, it just has to'.Only after he’d subjected it to cruel and inhuman punishment, ripped out its gorgeous lyrical heart, and drowned every last nuance of melancholy from its aching fragile bones.
I did suggest precisely this, on here, just after the show was announced, and posted the original versh of “Downtown Train” by way of contrast. If memrie serves, I didn’t get much in the way of a sympathetic hearing. God knows what the haters would make of some of Waits’s later stuff.
Anyhow. As posted earlier in the thread, I’m quite happy to note Younger Rod’s contribution to the great British songbook, and all that. His grim evisceration of “Downtown Train”, tho, outstrips even Ronan Keating’s hammering of “Fairytale of NY” as riposte to the myth that “you can’t keep a good song down”.
*shudder*
My wife regularly has to slap me back into reality as I'm in the corner rocking - there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no pl....