“Ol' 55” by Tom Waits

Tom Waits opened his 1973 debut, Closing Time, with "Ol' 55", and Asylum sent it out as the album's first single; it turned into a minor hit. The title is his own car, a 1955 Buick Roadmaster, and the song rolls along easy as a slow cruise down an empty highway: Waits at the piano, Shep Cooke and Peter Klimes on guitars, Bill Plummer's double bass, Jesse Ehrlich's cello, a glint of Delbert Bennett's trumpet, and John Seiter on drums and harmony vocals. Jerry Yester produced it, and Richard Moore engineered and mixed.

It has been called more conventional than the songs Waits wrote later, and that plainness is its charm, a young man's ballad with the rough edges tucked away. Plenty of other artists have covered it since.

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