“Don’t Go Drinkin’ on an Empty Heart.”
(A duet, female sections in italics)
Where’d I set my paint brush?
Gonna paint this town blue.
It’s a night of possibilities,
Christ, where’d I put my car keys?
Every night I’m drawn to the neon,
gotta put a clean shirt on.
Go where barstool women are off the chart,
Man, I’m just thinking of my empty heart.
What’s behind the bar,
Starin’ back at me from that jar?
Pickled eggs and an off-duty waitress
blowin’ her tips here in this mess.
She don’t care about the weather
or the Yankees game tonight
All I can get from her is a name tag.
Hello, my name is… Heather.
Heather…
What is it that you see
when you look at me?
Or am I just standing between you
and those bottles on the shelf.
Maybe I’d like to spend an afternoon
speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway.
With the top down, in the sun
in your old convertible Chevrolet.
Harold and Jane are playing pool
I’d give ’em a game if I had any class.
But they bring their own sticks,
so I know they’d kick my ass.
Is that Haggard on the juke box?
The top-shelf bottles are getting dusty
I’m going home with the janitor,
he’s named after his car, Rusty.
So let’s all go down to Marty’s Lounge,
at least me, anyway.
I’m a man of mystery,
it’s a mystery why she don’t go home with me.
Maybe I would have, I dunno,
if you told me you’d shot a man in Reno
just to watch him die.
This bar is like a roach trap
you chew off your leg to get out,
I don’t know why I even try.
One humid night I stood outside your window
watching in the yellow light of a single lamp.
You wore a string of pearls as you slipped off your dress,
my pants around my ankles.
Oh, you are a sad one
Alone, your TV dinner tray filled with dead cigarettes.
An internal conversation about your life,
moaning like you’ve got Tourettes.
Damn, they’re giving it away for free.
Everybody in this stinking bar is getting laid.
Everybody, except me.
They musta seen through me from the start,
Maybe I shoulda read my astrological chart.
We should be on the beach drinking mai tais
Listening to Jack Teagarden on the radio!
You think you’re an old soul,
But you’re just a kid with a bottle full of fireflies.
(Drunken chorus)
If he didn’t, Tom Waits shoulda said it,
don’t go drinkin’ on an empty heart.
If he didn’t, Tom Waits shoulda said it,
don’t go drinkin’ on an empty heart.