A number of years ago while performing in Australia, Tom Waits told the audience, “I borrowed your song.”

This got laughter and applause.

He let a beat pass, then added, “I’ll give it back when I’m done.”

What he borrowed was Waltzing Matilda, the well-known Australian folk song. What he did was incorporate the chorus into a song of his own called Tom Traubert’s Blues.

There is a reaction I have to certain songs. They make me weak in the knees, and I have to sit down to listen to them. My insides melt, and I’m jealous of the songwriters, wishing the songs were mine instead of theirs. Tom Traubert’s Blues is one of those.

Sad songs can be touching, but this goes beyond sad. It’s odd that I love it so much. It uses the name Matilda to mean alcohol and the phrase, Waltzing Matilda, to represent being drunk. It’s sung from the perspective of an alcoholic living on the street, and Waits sings it in a gravelly voice that lends an eerie realism to the lyric.

The song has a subtitle, so the full name is “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen).” There is a nautical idiom for extreme drunkenness: being three sheets to the wind. This is intensified here by adding a fourth sheet (sail) to the saying.

At the beginning, the man acknowledges that his woes are of his own making. He sings:

“Wasted and wounded, it ain’t what the moon did,
I’ve got what I paid for now.”

Then he instantly asks for money for a bottle:

“See ya tomorrow. Hey Frank, can I borrow
A couple of bucks from you? To go
Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda. You’ll go Waltzing Matilda with me.”

Though the story of the song is simple, the imagery is complex and the lyric is married perfectly to the melody. The richness of this makes the singer’s circumstance all the more piteous and poignant. He hates alcohol’s destructive force and the grip it has on him. Here’s how the craving is described:

“And you can ask any sailor, and the keys from the jailer,
And the old men in wheelchairs know
That Matilda’s the defendant, she killed about a hundred,
And she follows wherever you may go.”

The song is beautiful in spite of itself. There are others that manage this. Brick, by Ben Fold’s Five. The Freshmen, by The Verve Pipe. I Dreamed a Dream, from Les Misérables. (Heck, almost any song from Les Misérables.) But none can match the ability of Tom Traubert’s Blues to present tragedy as art.

This song may not touch you the way it does me, but you owe it to yourself to give it at least one listen.

Not many singers have covered it. Rod Stewart did a version, but it’s pale compared to Waits’ rendition. There are videos of Waits singing it live, but search for the studio version: Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen), from the album, Small Change (1976). You can find it on YouTube.

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