Black Market Baby

Producers

In a 1999 interview, Waits said: You texture and layer them and turn the lights down inside the song…after a while, you do it by taking things away, and adding things… Read More

Apr. 16, 19991 viewer5.4K views

Black Market Baby Lyrics

She lives in a house that's way back off the road
There's a man with a lantern and he carries her soul
A coal stove and a bed, a skillet and a hound
She drove a camel through a needle in this sinking boardwalk town

She's my black market baby
She's my black market baby
She's a diamond that wants to stay coal
Wants to stay coal

I swang out wide with her on hell's iron gate
Anything that you wanted, you could have
My eyes say their prayers to her, sailors ring her bell
The way a moth mistakes a light bulb for the moon and goes to hell

She's my black market baby
She's my black market baby
She's a diamond that wants to stay coal
Wants to stay coal

There's no prayer like desire, there's amnesia in her kiss
She's a swan and a pistol and she will follow you like this
In Moberly, Missouri at the Iroquois Hotel
She checked in with the President and she ran up quite a bill

She's my black market baby
She's my black market baby
She's a diamond that wants to stay coal
Wants to stay coal

She's whiskey in a teacup, she gives blondes a lousy name
She's a bonsai Aphrodite and a ticket back to Spain
She's a hard way to go, there ain't no way to stop
Every time you play the red, the black is coming up

She's my black market baby
She's my black market baby
She's a diamond that wants to stay coal
She wants to stay coal
My baby wants to stay coal
Coal
Coal
My baby wants to stay coal

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About

In a 1999 interview, Waits said:

You texture and layer them and turn the lights down inside the song…after a while, you do it by taking things away, and adding things, until you have just the right feeling for where you’re going. It’s like a room in your ears. It’s like throwing a T-shirt over the lamp by the bedside to change the way the motel looks. Kathleen came home with “Black Market Baby.” She had it almost all finished. She says, ‘She’s my black market baby, she’s my black market baby, she’s a diamond that wants to stay coal.’ I thought she said cold. That was almost finished the minute that she said that. Just kind of filled it in.