Tom Waits.

"Martha" is a song from the Tom Waits album "Closing Time". I had been aware of his work for years but never really connected with it. In all honesty I hadn't really tried that hard, being put off by the fact that what I had heard sounded like an unintelligible drawl.

Shame... I had missed out on a rare talent.

A friend of mine had a copy of "Closing Time" and I borrowed it thinking that I would give him "one more try." I've been a huge admirer of his work ever since. He will always polarise people into love/hate groups but all the best music tends to do that. "Closing Time" is probably one of his more accessible albums but none the worse for it. For me, I think of Tom Waits as a storyteller more than anything else, a gin soaked pianist sitting at the piano at two in the morning singing about his life.

Why this song? It made me cry like a baby when I first heard it, that's why.