Cover Story: Bridgers Waits for the “Day After Tomorrow”

In a classic tale of wintertime, Phoebe Bridgers covers Tom Waits’ war protest song from a very different perspective.

Written by Anjali Krishna

Image courtesy of Dead Oceans

Albeit limited hours of sunlight, winter is the time of light: of gleaming, glowing, glassy bulbs or softly glistening LEDs illuminating freshly fallen snow. The lights are brought forth by the bitter darkness, yes, but to think of the season as just  barren trees and biting weather would be reductive. Wintertime is also the season of the hearth, of family and togetherness, of wonder and faith.

This is the winter Tom Waits missed as he wrote “Day After Tomorrow,” representing a warmth and joy despite the chill outside. Over a soft and rustic acoustic guitar, with just a bit of Waits’ traditional twang, he grinds out a missive home to a loving family from a conflicted soldier anxious to return to his little town. Waits wrote the song in 2004, though with the American soldiers in Vietnam in mind.

The winter Waits writes from is war-torn and desolate, “it’s so hard / and it’s cold here.” His narrator is newly 21 and more confused than ever about his mission: is it what his army superiors are telling him in Vietnam? Or does he know in his heart that “they fill us full of lies / that everyone buys / about what it means to be a soldier?” He “still doesn’t know how [he’s] supposed to feel / about all the blood that’s been spilled.” Despite his inner turmoil, he’s plaintive: he knows only that he wants to come back home and be with those who love him.

Almost 20 years after Waits wrote the song, however, a voice of a different generation would use his words to tell a new story. This wouldn’t be one of drafts to war and the fear of the hole that war inevitably leaves, but a tale about leaving home and being alone in the big world. 

In 2021, Phoebe Bridgers painstakingly released a haunting cover of Waits’ “Day After Tomorrow.” Instead of telling the story of a son or brother drafted and now serving as a killer an ocean away, she seems to sing about a student, cold in a parka from home and missing their family as they study in a place that feels worlds apart from their comfortable home. The lyrics of the song remain unchanged, but coming from Bridgers, they seem to take on a meaning she imbues, and such a story emerges.

Though Bridgers’ soft and witty voice is the polar opposite of the Waits’ gritty seriousness, their subtle inflections and candid speaking tones contrast to set off the differences in their intentions in the story they tell. She trades out Waits’ guitar for a soft piano and a whispering set of strings that sounds like a cold wind blowing outside. 

Neither Waits nor Bridgers are from “old Rockford town / up by the Wisconsin border” (both are California natives), but they sing with such surety they make a convincing statement of it. It’s unlikely either ever shoveled snow and raked leaves enough to miss it. Yet in Bridgers’ hushed song is the nostalgia for once-hated tasks at home, and an outside cold moderated by the warmth waiting just inside. This home she misses so much is perhaps one she used to want to get away from.

Photos courtesy of Getty

Waits' throaty rasp wishes for simpler things, unmarred by war. He knows, as much as he wishes he doesn’t, that “We too are made / Of all the things that we have lost here.” The young boy he imagines returning to his family home is not the same one writing this song to his family. Perhaps he still is, in name and thought: the boy who “Believes that there’s gold / At the end of the road.” But this one has also seen things he wishes he hadn’t, and he feels it following him back. 

Religion is another subject on which both artists’ versions offer different perspectives. Because Bridgers is a self-proclaimed atheist, hearing her sing lines about God should be odd. In Waits’ version, his faith in God is childlike and hopeful, no questions asked; all that exists is a pure belief that what needs to be, will be. Bridgers, with a voice soft and low, seems to ascribe to the same belief. While Waits’ sings it as though God is an all-powerful force, shaping his life, and the only question is of which way it will go, Bridgers’ voice wavers and questions whether he has any influence at all.  The narrators in both versions learned their faith in their little town. Waits seems to have accepted it clearly and Bridgers is more skeptical, but with this winter haunting her, she seems willing to accept anything, any savior from the loneliness and bitter cold she feels. 

However different their circumstances, Waits and Bridgers are neither “fighting for justice,” they are “not fighting for freedom.” There are no valiant causes behind their lives: Waits is simply taking orders for a war he doesn’t believe in and Bridgers doesn’t see the value she once did in leaving home to study or work, away from her family. They are both simply “fighting for my life / and another day in the world here.” Cogs in a machine, parts of a whole, forgotten as an individual. Bridgers is perhaps on a college campus, among thousands of other students bundled up in too many winter jackets. Waits is in uniform, “just the gravel on the road.” 

One of the most significant sonic differences between the two songs arrives at the end. A humming chorus takes over as Bridgers transitions to a nonverbal version of “Silent Night.” Subtly, she evokes a church choir, quiet in their practice, as if she is walking past it on her way home from college for the first time. The home she’s coming back to, the one she once wished so hard to escape, is a safe haven. Her family and friends surround her, and blanketed by such safety, she finds warmth again.

Waits ends with his own version of quiet contemplation. He chants, “ And my plane will touch down / on the day after tomorrow” like an anthem, reminding himself that where he is now is not permanent. Home is nearly on its way. “Silent Night” doesn’t play in Waits’ version, but he feels the carol all the same Finally, his plane touches down. Finally, silence as the engines quiet down, and finally, warmth in more than weather as he steps into the door of his family home: his forever hearth.