The Instrument You Don't Play Yet

It is 1983. Tom Waits is thirty-three years old, sitting in a Los Angeles rehearsal room with a chamberlin, a parade bass drum, a marimba, an accordion, and a stack of instruments most singer-songwriters would not know how to hold. He has been making records for ten years that sound like the same man — piano, brushed drums, smoky low croon, beat poetry over jazz changes. Asylum wants another one. Instead he is teaching himself instruments he cannot play, and writing songs the piano would not have let him write.

The album that comes out of that room is "Swordfishtrombones." Kathleen Brennan, his wife and creative partner — who knew Captain Beefheart and Harry Partch and Mexican funeral bands — helps him hear what the new pile of instruments can do. The label refuses it. He leaves. Island puts it out exactly as delivered. Twelve songs, no piano ballad in sight, drums tracked in a tiled bathroom, a horn section that sounds like it learned the chart on the bus ride over. Critics do not know what to do with it. The next two records — "Rain Dogs" and "Frank's Wild Years" — build a whole second career on top of what that one sideways step uncovered.

The mechanism is plain when you sit with it. A guitarist writes guitar songs. A piano player writes piano songs. Not by choice, but because the hand finds the chord shape it already knows, and the shape suggests the next one, and the song arrives along a path the hands have already walked a thousand times. The hands are doing the writing as much as the mind is. Hand someone a banjo they cannot play, and the mind has to lead. Whatever comes out will not sound like the last record.

Paul Simon wrote "Bridge Over Troubled Water" on a piano he played only competently — a folk guitarist reaching for chord voicings his six strings could not make, finding the gospel modulation that turned a small song into a benediction. Keith Richards retuned a guitar to open G with the low E removed sometime around 1968 and discovered an instrument that wrote "Honky Tonk Women," "Brown Sugar," and "Start Me Up" for him — songs that do not arrive in standard tuning. George Harrison carried a sitar home from the set of "Help!" in 1965, studied with Ravi Shankar as a beginner for a year, and the textures of "Norwegian Wood" and "Within You Without You" came back from an instrument he had only just begun to understand. The pattern keeps repeating. The instrument is co-writing.

This is not a trick. It is the recognition that the song is partly the instrument and partly you, and that holding the same one too long means writing the same song with different lyrics until even you cannot tell them apart. The fix is not better discipline. The fix is putting the familiar instrument down for a week and picking up something the hands have to think about. The clumsiness is the point. The clumsiness is what keeps the mind in charge.

Try the upright bass if you write on guitar. Try the autoharp. Try the toy piano your daughter outgrew. Try the cheap nylon-string nobody wants. Write three bad songs. Write a fourth that is not bad. Notice that it does not sound like the last record. Notice that it could not have.

Find the instrument you cannot play. The song that is waiting for you is on it.