Tom Waits and the Story Behind “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You”

This is Our American Stories, and now it’s time for one of our favorite segments. The story of a song is a jingle, and today’s comes from an artist who songs are best known through cover versions by other musicians. His ‘Jersey Girl’ was performed by Bruce Springsteen. His ‘All ’55” was sung by the Eagles. ‘Down There by the Train’ by Johnny Cash. ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You’ by Ten Thousand Maniacs, ‘The Long Way Home’ by Nora Jones, ‘I Don’t Want to Grow Up’ by the Ramones, and ‘Downtown Train’ by Rod Stewart. And by the way, just from the mix of those artists, you’ve got to say, “Wow, what range!” Today’s song is about one man, one woman, and one tavern. No further ado. Let’s take a listen to find out more about this one-of-a-kind American singer-songwriter.

All, our next guest is one of the most distinctive writers and performers working today.

He’s kind of a combination poet, jazz singer, and vagrant.

He is a mixture of Satchmo Armstrong and Humphrey Bog.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tom Waits.

Oh, Ay, your.

Tom, better than nothing.

Your songs are about waitresses and bartenders and moms.

Why do you celebrate these people in song? For the same reason that a lawyer hangs out in a pool room? Or do you find a lot of photographers at a wedding?

You know, it’s a…

Find a lot of ideas here, and there’s a lot of life going on around here. And you know, so I’m kind of a bit of a private investigator.

You know.

You know, my dad spent a lot of time in the bars, drink in the afternoon and really dark bars, and so I was drawn to the dark places. I mean, everybody needs a different climate in order to create. Mine usually comes, and uh, if I’m talking to somebody in a bar or something, I get a couple of bloggers and try to stretch out in conversation and try to open things up, and then I try to remember it all later and then I write it down.

There’s a real romance hanging around these places. It’s where you go to meet girls, but it’s also where you go to invent yourself in strangers’ eyes. These are the extraordinary painter of pictures as well as a teller of stories.

Looking for the hat Saturday?

Is it the Cracker, the Pool bows, Neon, both, loneliness?

It’s so much at the heart of so much of his music.

I think it’s just…

A longing for something and being alone, and how do…

You live with that? And how do you deal with it? Magic, go to Melancottage. Here in your eyes.

I think Waits is a poet of doomed no-hopers, people who are almost like characters from a noir novel. They’re getting their last chance at love, dumbling onto the Saturday.

He was just a man out of time, clearly, and he knew it, I think obviously, and he played with it, craft and young genius of someone who was coming up with lyrics that were on a par with someone like Johnny Mercer or Hogy Carmichael or any of the songwriters that had been the backbone of the classic American songbook.

Swam Oweing Done, Run, swam, Jeans Manny.

The Great American Songbook is something that either gets to you or it doesn’t. And it got to Tom because there was a lot of intelligence in that, in the lyrics of those songs.

I would go over to my friends’ houses and go into the den with their dads and find out what they were listening. I couldn’t wait to be an old man. I was about thirteen. Now, I didn’t really identify with the music of my own generation, but I seem to like the old Steph Coporter, Gershwin, Frank snatzra.

What is this thing?

Called love?

Tom had that wonderful talent to absorb all of these things that he saw. It’s like storing up paints and being able to dig out the colors you want when you get ready to paint a picture. Hey, this is what he does.

He paints pictures, and so true, and one of Tom Waits his most heartbreaking, beautiful picture songs is called ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You’. This tender storyteller, with a boozy baritone, while wearing a seven dollars suit and an old man’s weathered fedora hat, expresses what a billion men have felt, not the least on a lonely Saturday night. Here’s ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You’.

Now it’s closing, the last coll drinks. I’ll have another stout. Well, I turn around and look at you. You know what’s up. Found that’s a place for your lost face because I have a round.

And I think.

And I just feel love.

And the turn in the fourth phrase, ‘I hope that you don’t fall in love with me’. After exposing all of his fears of commitment, the narrator realizes he is falling for this girl that he’s never met, but now must face the realization she may return the favor. You can feel the pain of a man afraid of commitment in this song. He fumbles and worries, and once he finally gets the confidence to face her, well, it’s too late. She’s on, and he knows he’s missed his shot. And that’s the world of Tom Waits. That’s the world he inhabited in his music. “I was always wanting to be an old man,” he said, listening to Sinatra when everybody else was listening to rock and roll. The work of Tom Waits, the life of Tom Waits, the story of a song, ‘I Hope I Don’t Fall in Love with You’. This is Our American Stories, Liehabib here, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get our podcasts. Any story you missed or want to hear again can be found there daily again. Please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you get your podcasts. It helps us keep these great American stories coming.