In the early 1970s, Mattel sold a home organ called the Optigan that played its sounds off optical discs holding recordings of other musicians’ instruments, so every note it makes is a ghost of a session that happened somewhere else. Producer Nick Kinsey, who also plays drums and keyboards on the track, ran his vintage Optigan through a four-track cassette recorder for Eddie Skuller’s cover of Tom Waits’ “House Where Nobody Lives,” and those borrowed tones hover around the edges like voices in an empty room.
Everything at the center was captured with living people present. Skuller sang live to two-inch tape during the basic tracking at Kinsey’s upstate New York studio, The Chicken Shack, with no edits and no vocal overdubs. Waits built the song on the idea that the people inside give a home its worth, an idea he packs into one line: “If there’s love in a house, it’s a palace for sure.” Skuller’s version makes the case with its lineup. His son Jack Skuller plays guitar, and Jeremy Chatzky, a bassist who has backed Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle, holds down the low end.
Skuller has long been drawn to abandoned houses and the stories they once held, and he picked a song from Mule Variations, the Waits album that won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, to explore that pull. His cover keeps the empty house in view while filling the studio around it with a father singing in one take and his son’s guitar right beside him. The Optigan supplies the ghosts. The Skullers supply the people living in the house.
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