I have no use for the truth

Not content with just an ordinary, single-disc release, the great songwriter and many-sided musician Tom Waits released a 3 CD set a few weeks ago, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, organizing a set of new as well as old but previously unreleased songs into three categories, basically blues, ballads and weird spoken word experiments respectively. The first single, also the first song on Brawlers, is Lie to Me, a short but powerful rockabilly song that might be viewed as Waits's twisted take on Elvis Presley. The video for this song consists in a series of still photographs "strung together to look like Waits is dancing as he mugs and struts through the tune", as Pitchforkmedia describe it.



(For a recent live performance of the song on the Late Show with David Letterman, see YouTube again.)

Of course you can understand the urgent request to your 'baby' to lie to you -- I have no use for the truth! -- as merely funny or even nonsensical. And God knows Waits can be dead funny and hilariously incongruous, as in these video excerpts:

- Waits performing a shortened version of one of his most absurd songs, "The piano has been drinking heavily (not me)", back in 1977, and cracking jokes and oneliners ("I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy") with his interviewers:



- Waits talking about making up wars and thereby messing up his kids' homework, and about an exceptionally intelligent and artistically gifted horse:



Even so, there is a more serious way of thinking about 'lie to me' -- as students of literature will know, the tension between 'Wahrheit' and 'Dichtung' has preoccupied many practitioners and theoreticians of literature. For Waits the tension is quickly resolved, clearly in favour of 'Dichtung', as he explains in a recent Pitchforkmedia interview:

I make stuff up. There's nothing that you can say that will mean the same thing once it's been repeated. We're all making leaner versions of stories. Before there was recording, everything was subject to the folk process.
(...)
There is no such thing as nonfiction. There is no such thing as truth. People who really know what happened aren't talking. And the people who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up. It's the same with your own stories, the ones that circulate around with your family and your friends. We're all part of the same hypocrisy.