Waiting Around to Die

Townes called it the first serious song he ever wrote. He said it came at the bar of the Jester Lounge after talking to an old man who put out a certain feeling; his first wife Fran remembered him writing it for hours in their closet in Houston, when she had hoped for a love song. The narrator's father beats his mother, he drifts through a Tuscaloosa bar, a robbery and two years in a Muskogee prison, and ends with his only friend, codeine. Stereogum said he delivers it like a man reading the six o'clock news.

It was his first single in 1968 and was on his debut; the upload in the hypersongs web is his spare 1969 re-recording. In Heartworn Highways he sings it to Uncle Seymour Washington. The Be Good Tanyas' version plays in Breaking Bad.