Fantastic. I wish I did this song, and those great lyrics.
But the melody... did Tom Waits borrow this one, like he did with Tom Traubert's Blues?

oh yeh... Auld Lang Syne or something, right?

the intro is Auld Lang Syne, but the rest of the song seems very familiar...

This is perhaps my favourite Waits song. I have to say "perhaps" because he's written so many masterpieces, but I really do love this one.

You can almost picture him in his crumpled jacket and newsboy hat, perched on the counter of some seedy New York bar, knocking back the booze and talking to complete strangers the whole night through...

My favorite Tom Waits song. To me this song is just about returning home, to discover that so much has changed. Now, with my first year of college almost complete, I can relate to so much of this, losing a friend in a car crash, seeing so many people leave and never come back (likely yours truly) and more. Really deep, heartfelt song, I get goosebumps listening to it.

The melody is based on the Christmas song 'The First Noelle'. This is probably my favourite Waits song, it's just beautiful.

I think it's sung from the point of view of a guy sitting at a bar drowning his sorrows, so to speak. An old friend comes home (maybe for Christmas time going on the melody) and decides to visit his old hangout/bar only to find out from his old friend at the bar (the singer) that they're all gone their seperate ways. The majority of the song is these two catching up on old times. The singer fills the other guy in on what's happened to everybody. The singer definitely comes across as very lonely the all the old gang are gone, I'd guess that before his old friend walked in he was sitting at the bar on his own.

I love the way that, from line to line, it jumps between different conversation topics, showing the progression of the convo throughout the night and how time passes so quickly as they're catching up. In the last verse, for example, they're challenging each other to pinball in one line and the singer is telling his friend to approach a girl in the next. It's kinda sad, I think this really conveys how delighted they are to see each other after all these years. The night flies by and it'll be years more before they see each other again (if ever).

Gotta say, the second last verse (where he tells about his old friend being killed in a crash) gets me every time. The line "he died with the radio on" is amazing. It's syllabically shorter than all the other lines that take place at that part of the melody during the song and because of this (the dead, unexpected stop in the lyrics) it just hits you. It's possible that this was done not just to make you notice but to reflect the notion of the car stopping suddenly upon hitting the telephone pole. Apart from that the line itself sends a chill down my spine. It's such a small detail to say that the radio was on but it just personalises it so much and places you in the situation yourself.

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough...