Regrets, I’ve had a few

By Laura Barton

PEGGY LEE Is That All There Is?
For all the defiant set of Lee’s jaw as she recounts the great non-events of her life (fires and circuses and love among them), there’s something in the gait of this song—the lurching piano staggering beneath the world-weary exhalation of her delivery—that suggests a weight of regret.

TOM WAITS Martha
A long-distance telephone call, and a conversation that should have been held 40 years earlier, make for one of Waits’s most wistful tracks. The caller, "Tom Frost", pines for those "days of roses, poetry and prose" that he once shared with Martha, the keenness of his yearning amplified by the passage of time and by remorse for his youthful mistakes.