When listening to Tom Waits’s stately ballad, “Coney Island Baby,” one pictures an ancient Italian grandfather, standing on a windswept boardwalk, boasting about his granddaughter to anyone who will listen. “When I am with her,” he rattles, “I’m the richest man in the town.” A mournful violin and trumpet provide a lonely reply, a modest counterpoint to this beautiful June day.
Song of the Day: “Coney Island Baby”
Max Gray
Read more of Max Gray at Big City Sasquatch or follow him on Twitter @City_Sasquatch. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Encounters, Mount Hope, Conte, tNY.press, and English Kills Review. He co-hosts the etymology podcast Words For Dinner and is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program.