Ahead of Tom Waits’s 70th birthday, The Del Fuegos’ Warren Zanes produced a compilation of cover songs, Come On Up To The House: Women Sing Waits—and Phoebe Bridgers put her own spin on “Georgia Lee.”
The 1999 track is about the 1997 murder of a 12-year-old black girl named Georgia Lee Moses. After she disappeared from her Santa Rosa, Calif. home, her body was found by a freeway on-ramp nine days later. The case remains unsolved.
The opening lines recount this scene:
Cold was the night, hard was the ground
They found her in a small grove of trees
Lonesome was the place where Georgia was found
She’s too young to be out on the street
Waits, a father of three, ended up attending her funeral. “A lot of people came and spoke,” he said, according to Billboard. “Everybody was wondering, where were the police, where was the deacon, where were the social workers, and where was I and where were you.”
Bridgers tweeted about how “no one published anything” about her disappearance:
The Mule Variations artist memorialized Moses, as he sings:
Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for Georgia Lee?
Zanes spoke to NPR about the artistry of Waits’ turn of phrase. “It’s got that line ‘Why wasn’t God watching?’” he said. “And I just think that if you’re a writer and that’s the only line that you write in your entire career, you should be studied in universities.”
A handful of big names—including Aimee Mann, Roseanne Cash, and Corinne Bailey Rae—reinterpreted other Waits tracks on the tribute album.
Earlier this year, Bridgers and Conor Oberst released a collaborative album under the name Better Oblivion Community Center. Last year, she released the boygenius EP with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker.
Listen to Phoebe Bridgers’ cover of “Georgia Lee” above, and read all the lyrics on Genius now.
