The above is the title of a Tom Waits song I've never heard till tonight. I've always heard good things about this song so I intentionally avoided ever reading the lyrics online or anything. So tonight I finally get around to downloading the song, and I listen to it... and holy shit, it is the most depressing fucking song I've ever heard. It's written from the perspective of, as the title would suggest, a hooker in Minneapolis, and she's writing a Christmas card to her old friend Charlie about how great her life is now that she's cleaned up and stopped being a hooker and all; she's got a husband who loves her and all this and her life's great. Then the last verse is just her saying that everything she just wrote was bullshit and she's really writing from jail because she needs to borrow money to pay a lawyer. Over the course of three and a half minutes he makes you so happy for this poor girl who's turned her life around and then he completely destroys all of it.So now I'm just depressed... fucking Tom Waits...
(Responses follow.)
Lou B: Wanna talk about a one-two knock out punch of depression? Try listening to "Misery is the River of the World" and "God's Away on Business" back to back.
Me: Why would I want a one-two punch of depression?
Lou B: It was a rhetorical question, numb nut.
Devon: For my money, the songs that will give you a real kidney shot of depression are "All The World Is Green" and "Coney Island Baby".-DEVON!
Me: While I agree with you both about the general content of the Blood Money album, I feel a lot of the really downbeat stuff comes in his earlier work, like "Bad Liver & A Broken Heart" or "Martha". Blood Money is brilliant, but almost- almost- too strange sounding to be as affecting as his earlier work.
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