Diamonds on My Windshield

Diamonds on My Windshield is the fifth track on The Heart of Saturday Night, Tom Waits's second album, released by Asylum on October 15, 1974. Waits wrote it, and it runs 3:12. It was not a single and has no chart history. The album was made at Wally Heider's Studio 3 in Hollywood with Bones Howe producing and engineering; exact recording dates were not found beyond the year 1974.

It is a poem recited over a jazz backing, described by the label ANTI- as the first of Waits's signature spoken-word pieces, in the manner of Kerouac, Langston Hughes and Bob Kaufman. A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame biography, seen only in a search summary, calls it the first recorded example of Waits reciting poetry over jazz and names Kerouac and Steve Allen's 1959 LP Poetry for the Beat Generation as influences.

Who plays

MusicBrainz credits this track to Waits on vocals and piano, Pete Christlieb on tenor saxophone, Bill Goodwin on drums and Jim Hughart on double bass, with Bob Alcivar arranging and Geoff Howe assisting. Wikipedia's album-wide list instead names Tom Scott on tenor saxophone and Jim Gordon on drums; that list is not track-specific, and the two are unresolved.

Live versions include the Bottom Line in New York on December 18, 1976 at 6:27, Bremen on April 26, 1977 and the Troubadour on August 16, 1975. The studio recording is also on Anthology of Tom Waits and Asylum Years, both from 1984, and on the 2018 remaster from Anti-/Epitaph on March 9. The upload is from Waits's own channel with a plain title; it is probably the album version, but its length was not checked.