1977 · Behind the Songs
A Tom Waits sea shanty, dressed for the stage.
Tom Waits wrote “Shiver Me Timbers” for his 1974 album The Heart of Saturday Night, when he was still a young songwriter building a reputation in Los Angeles clubs. The song is a sailor’s lament — a man at sea thinking of home — sung in the gravelly whisper that would become Waits’ signature. Three years later, Bette Midler picked it up for Broken Blossom (1977), her fourth studio album. She was one of the first major pop stars to record a Tom Waits song, and the contrast is instructive: where Waits sounds like he is confessing, Midler sounds like she is performing. The piano stays front and center, and the ache in the lyric becomes theater — which was always her home ground.
Broken Blossom was a quieter record than the ones that made her famous, and “Shiver Me Timbers” fits its mood — less camp, more candlelight. Hearing her sing a Waits song in 1977 is a reminder of how wide her taste ran: the same singer who revived 1940s swing could hear the tenderness under Waits’ rough edges. The song was never a single and rarely turns up on her compilations, which is exactly why it rewards a revisit — it is Midler the interpreter at her most curious, finding a torch song inside a sea shanty.