He Tells You All His Secrets But He Lies About His Past

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.  He could run, but he couldn't hide.  Everywhere he went, there he was.

Pick your cliche.  They all applied to him back in 1987.  Within a year of moving to New York, his life upstate was almost exactly like it was back in Atlanta again, only worse.  He had met a woman up there, and immediately transferred all of his unresolved feelings and emotions about Denver onto her.  It was fun for a while, but when things ultimately didn't work out, he was right back in the funk again.

It was around this time that he first got into Tom Waits.  It really wasn't all that far of a leap from the country music and western swing of the year before to the distorted Americana of Waits.  He enjoyed Waits' swordfishtrombone (1983) and Rain Dogs (1985), but it was the unsettling Frank's Wild Years, with its dark lyrics and boozy melodies, that matched his 1987 frame of mind.  With a voice sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car" (Daniel Durchholz), Waits' lyrical milieu of run-down bars, degenerate characters, and thwarted dreams and ambitions described well the rust-belt towns of upstate NY in which he was living and working.  Waits provided the perfect soundtrack for the raw emotions he was feeling at the time. 

To be sure, he was listening to a lot of other music at the time as well.  He was still listening to The Art of Noise, still listening to The Style Council, and still listening to all the other music that was being produced that year - he was a contemporary man living in contemporary times.  He owned a radio.  But looking back at that year, he mainly remembers Waits' music and that gravelly voice in his head, singing about the cold, cold ground and being sent off to bed forevermore.

He was in a dark place.