Tom Waits / Closing Time (Remastered) / 1973
Ol' '55
wistful, glowing, quietly euphoric
A young man leaves a lover's house at dawn and drives home in his old car, savoring the drive itself as much as the memory he's leaving behind. It's a small, tender scene stretched into a full emotional experience through repetition and atmosphere rather than plot.
morning-after tenderness nostalgia for the present moment the road as freedom and solitude youthful romanticism transience
Who's speaking
First-person narrator recounting a specific morning drive; he addresses no one directly except a brief aside to 'the Lord,' making the song feel like an interior monologue or a private confession rather than a dialogue. He seems fully reliable — there's no irony undercutting his sincerity.
What happens
The song doesn't really develop a plot; it circles a single moment. The narrator hurries to his car after leaving someone's place, and as he drives, the physical sensations of the road — traffic, fading stars, the rising sun — blend with his emotional state. The repeated choruses don't advance time so much as suspend it, letting the narrator relive the same feeling of reluctant departure and building elation over and over.
How it's built
Built on a simple verse-chorus loop where the chorus barely varies and the second verse simply restates the first, reinforcing the sense of a memory being replayed rather than a story moving forward. The lack of a bridge or resolution mirrors the loop of the drive itself — it just fades out on the same phrase, as if the car (and the feeling) keeps going after the song ends.
Craft
- sensory catalog
- Waits piles up concrete roadside details — passing trucks, flashing lights, fading stars — to make the ordinary act of driving feel charged and cinematic.
- religious diction
- Words like 'holy' and the invocation of 'Lord' elevate a mundane morning drive into something like a spiritual experience, suggesting the narrator finds a kind of grace in ordinary happiness.
- repetition/refrain
- The nearly identical choruses and closing repeated phrase about traffic create a hypnotic loop that mimics the rhythm of driving and the way a good memory gets replayed.
- internal rhyme and syncopation
- Phrases built on quick, tumbling rhymes give the verses a breathless, propulsive quality that matches the hurried departure and highway motion.
Reading it
Most straightforwardly, this is a simple love song about the glow of an early relationship, where even the inconvenience of leaving before dawn becomes something cherished. An alternate reading leans on Waits' broader persona: the song could be less about a specific lover and more about romanticizing solitude and motion itself — the car, the road, and the dawn light as the real object of affection, with the person left behind almost incidental to the mood they inspired. The lyric supports both readings without forcing a choice between them.
Context
This is one of the best-known songs from Waits' 1973 debut album Closing Time, recorded when he was still working in a relatively straightforward folk-pop idiom before his voice and songwriting turned toward the grittier, more theatrical style he became known for. The song was later covered by the Eagles, which helped its commercial visibility, though Waits' original has a more intimate, unpolished warmth.
Listen for
- the way the chorus barely changes but still feels like it's building emotionally each time
- the contrast between hurried, tumbling verse language and the more spacious, floating chorus
- the closing repetition that trails off rather than resolving, mimicking a car driving out of earshot
- the brief religious language sitting inside an otherwise plainspoken lyric
About Tom Waits
Thomas Alan Waits is an American singer, songwriter, composer and actor. His lyrics often focus on society's underbelly and are delivered in his trademark deep, gravelly voice.
b. 1949 / United States
Full biography and catalogue