“Jersey Girl” by Tom Waits

Tom Waits wrote "Jersey Girl" for Kathleen Brennan, the woman he would go on to marry, who had been making her home in New Jersey, and he put it on Heartattack and Vine in 1980. It caught even Waits off guard: in a 1980 interview he called it his first experiment with nonsense-syllable singing, something he never expected to hear himself doing in a song.

Bones Howe produced, Jerry Yester arranged, and the band dresses it up for a night by the ocean, Waits on electric guitar, Roland Bautista on 12-string, Greg Cohen on bass, John Thomassie on drums and Victor Feldman adding glockenspiel and percussion. The arrangement carries the salt-air sway of "Under the Boardwalk" and "Spanish Harlem". He was still singing it years later, giving it a quiet reading on VH1 Storytellers in 1999.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.