The Earth Is Dreaming

For Easter this past Sunday (an actual live, in-person service, our church's first since March 2020, outdoors at Greenpoint's Transmitter Park), I played Tom Waits's great, deceptively simple "You Can Never Hold Back Spring," one of his late-period masterworks, and a song that almost casually but quite earnestly links the annual rebirth of the earth to a personal god—at least, as I hear it. (Who else could be "the one who's dreaming of you" he refers to at the end of the bridge?)

Waits, in fact, has been as frequent a fixture on our church playlist as Dylan or Leonard Cohen, from "Come On Up to the House" (with the indelible throwdown, "Come down off the cross, we can use the wood") to "Down There By the Train" (with its stunning final image, "I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth") to the catchy Wire theme "Way Down in the Hole." (No, we haven't quite had the nerve to do "Chocolate Jesus" or "God's Away on Business.") Like many of the best songwriters, Waits has God on his mind and/or in his rep company of usual suspects, at least part of the time, whether it's to deplore a gaping absence (the wrenching "Georgia Lee") or affirm a warming presence that is "dreaming of spring."