“Clap Hands” is the second track on Tom Waits‘ ninth album, Rain Dogs, the second album that got took him in far weirder directions than his more traditional singer-songwriter-with-a-jazzbo-flair early work. “Clap Hands” is typical of this then new sound, as it is powered mostly by marimbas, with the acoustic guitar buried in the mix, and features an arty guitar solo by Marc Ribot. (Curiously, the song does not feature clapping hands.) Though it is not one of Waits’ most famous songs, it does get its fair share of covers.
Country star Eric Church has a brand new album out. That album departs somewhat from his sound, and country more broadly. One pretty clear indication of that is that he not only covered Tom Waits on it, but he covered a particularly Waitsian song in “Clap Hands.”
Percussion is still a prominent part of Church’s version of the song, only this time it’s programmed drums, some percussive string stabs early on and, appropriately, processed hand claps. Church’s guitar is a little more prominent in the mix, for parts of it, but this is a much denser mix than the original. And that’s because Church has vastly expanded the instrumental palette of what was originally a relatively simple song. In addition to the acoustic guitar, percussion and vocal of the original Church adds a full orchestra and a gospel choir. There are electric guitar solos in both but the electric in Church’s version hangs around after the solo.
The result is something that is still unmistakably the Tom Waits song but filtered through an extremely different lens. Church’s voice remains pure country, and gospel singers and orchestra take the song to places Waits never would. (Well, 1970s Waits might have had the orchestra, but it would have sounded a lot more traditional than this arrangement.) It’s a neat cover that is both fairly faithful and also quite distinct at the same time.
