Recorded at Wally Heider Studio, Hollywood, California.

If Closing Time, Tom Waits' debut album, consisted of love songs set in a late-night world of bars and neon signs, its follow-up, The Heart of Saturday Night, largely dispenses with the romance in favor of poetic depictions of the same setting. On "Diamonds on My Windshield" and "The Ghosts of Saturday Night," Waits doesn't even sing, instead reciting his verse rhythmically against bass and drums like a Beat hipster. Musically, the album contains the same mixture of folk, blues, and jazz as its predecessor, with producer Bones Howe occasionally bringing in an orchestra to underscore the loping melodies. Waits' songs are sometimes sketchier in addition to being more impersonal, but "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night" and "Semi Suite" are the equal of anything on Closing Time. Still, with lines such as "...the clouds are like headlines/Upon a new front page sky" and references to "a 24-hour moon" and "champagne stars," Waits' imagery is beginning to get florid, and in material this stylized, the danger of self-parody is always present. ~ William Ruhlmann

On his second album, Waits moved beyond the simple folk-rock arrangements of his debut to explore jazzier realms. Though artistically Waits was still in his infancy, it was here that he began to develop the bedraggled, chain-smoking, whiskey-swilling, beat poetry-spouting street character image that he expanded on throughout the '70s. The arrangements are based around Waits' voice (beginning to develop that famous rasp) and piano, supported '50s-style West Coast jazz touches. Since Waits was still struggling through the imitation phase of his fascination with the writing of Kerouac, Bukowski, etc., some of the lyrics seem callow, but even at this early stage he could still produce gems. "The Heart of Saturday Night" (sort of a low-key sequel to "Ol' '55") and the late-night lonesome blues of "Please Call Me Baby" are worth the price of entry in and of themselves.