The Heart of Saturday Night

七十年代以来非常有影响的音乐人，名演员Tom Waits的第二张专辑，是他早期最有代表性的作品。他粗犷而富有表现力的嗓音让人听过之后就难以忘怀，他早期的歌曲多关注的是边缘底层人物的生活，旋律简单直接，亲切感人。"Diamonds on My Windshield" 和 "The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone's Pizza House)"都是名作。专辑的封面参考了白人爵士王Frank Sinatra的In the Wee Small Hours，画风如出一辙。

这张专辑在滚石杂志选出的500张历代最强专辑中排名第339位。

The Heart of Saturday Night is the second studio album by singer and songwriter Tom Waits, released in 1974 on Asylum Records. In 2003, the album was ranked number 339 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, his highest placing. The album cover is based on In the Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra. Cal Schenkel was the art director and the cover art was by Lyn Lascaro aka Napolean.

If Closing Time, Tom Waits' debut album, consisted of love songs set in a late-night world of bars and neon signs, its follow-up, The Heart of Saturday Night, largely dispenses with the romance in favor of poetic depictions of the same setting. On "Diamonds on My Windshield" and "The Ghosts of Saturday Night," Waits doesn't even sing, instead reciting his verse rhythmically against bass and drums like a Beat hipster. Musically, the album contains the same mixture of folk, blues, and jazz as its predecessor, with producer Bones Howe occasionally bringing in an orchestra to underscore the loping melodies. Waits' songs are sometimes sketchier in addition to being more impersonal, but "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night" and "Semi Suite" are the equal of anything on Closing Time. Still, with lines such as "...the clouds are like headlines/Upon a new front page sky" and references to "a 24-hour moon" and "champagne stars," Waits' imagery is beginning to get florid, and in material this stylized, the danger of self-parody is always present.