Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle
One From The Heart

This record contains the tracks written by Waits for Francis Ford Coppola's film "One from the Heart" (in Italy "Un sogno lungo un giorno").

And it met a similar fate.

Francis, overwhelmed by the box office flop, had to regain the trust of producers, and Tom, despite garnering an Oscar nomination, spent the period following the film's release justifying to his more traditionalist fans the easy listening slip.

It was a misunderstanding for both.

The movie is delightful, and Coppola gently moves the camera, sliding into the artificial city that captures the sentimental stories of the Forrest-Garr couple.

And Tom, with an elegance that escaped many, captures the film's key moments by borrowing the style from the great American sentimental song, with affectionate tributes to Cole Porter and Duke Ellington.

The female voice (the "compromised" Crystal Gayle), far from being a disappointing sugary concession, represents the necessary female perspective of the story.

Splendid, airy, the title track, top-notch melodic solutions in many tracks (Is There Any Way Out of This Dream? - Picking Up After You - Old Boyfriends), and rightfully famous is Broken Bicycles, one of the very few tracks from the record that remained in live performances.

Ellington smiles behind I Beg Your Pardon, and even more unsettling and singularly anticipatory of future sounds is You Can't Unring a Bell.

My personal opinion is that disregarding the reason for writing these pieces, that is, the commentary on a film, ultimately undermines their evaluation.

Obviously, the tracks are "genre" because the intent was precisely to recreate a certain aroma of past musicals.

Proof that Tom did nothing but immerse himself in a specific context is the musical wave of that period. A couple of years earlier, there was the gritty and raw blues of the outstanding "Heartattack and Vine," and the following year, the epochal turn of "Swordfishtrombone" would come. As if to say, nothing could be further from this deliberate cinematic sentimentalism.

In my opinion, not a fall at all (as it has been written), but a brilliant demonstration of the eclecticism of this great artist.