On Tom Waits’s 1983 album, Swordfishtrombones, there is, in among a lot of fabulously unhinged musical experimentation (Tony Bennett described the record as “a guy in an ashcan sending messages”), a 90-second ballad of such tender beauty that it explains all the rest. The song was written for Waits’s wife, Kathleen Brennan – “She’s my only true love/ She’s all that I think of, look here/In my wallet/That’s her” – and named after the town, Johnsburg, Illinois, in which Brennan grew up. The pair had got together on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1981 film One from the Heart, for which Waits was writing the music and Brennan editing the script, and had married a couple of months later at 1am at the 24-hour Always Forever Yours Wedding Chapel in Los Angeles.
The union liberated Waits from what may have appeared his inevitable fate: of the ultimate bar-room balladeer who descends into dissolution and obscurity. The singer had spent the first decade or so of his career toying with that possibility, living partly in the Tropicana motel on Sunset Boulevard, or in his car, a 1955 Buick, writing and singing about dereliction and doomed love, and playing up to a reputation for “wasted and wounded” chaos. For the first time, having met Brennan, he said: “I now believe in happy endings.” The experimentation of Swordfishtrombones was the first expression of that faith. “My life was getting more settled,” Waits recalled. “I was staying out of bars. But my work was becoming more scary.”
