“Well It’s brave for us to stay
Even braver to go
Wherever she goes I go
Maybe things will be better in Chicago”
I totally get it if Tom Waits is not your thing, if “WTF is that voice?” or “You’re telling me that’s an instrument?” etc. is your reaction to any of his genre-bending music, but I’m obviously not that person. So anyway, when my YouTube suggestions swung between “14 Reasons You Hate The Islanders But Watch Anyway” and “‘Chicago’ (live on Letterman) by Tom Waits,” I had a serendipitous hockey-meets-musical-tastes moment.
The Islanders are on a terrible road trip where everything has gone wrong — subpar play, a backbreaking blown lead-turned-regulation loss, a broken-stick air-ball late winner (same game), a goal when our star goalie’s skate blade came off, which is just not a thing that happened back in the day.