'Clap Hands' by Eric Church - Lyrics & Meaning

Written by Tom Waits, 'Clap Hands' was originally released as an experimental sounding track from the 1985 Waits classic Rain Dogs, a loose concept album about "the urban dispossessed" of New York City, generally considered to be the middle album of a trilogy that includes Swordfishtrombones and Frank's Wild Years.

Eric Church released Evangeline vs. The Machine in May 2025, and closed the album with his version of Tom Waits' 'Clap Hands.'

“An album is a snapshot in time that lasts for all time,” Church shared about the creative approach behind his highly anticipated new 8-song project, Evangeline vs. The Machine, the first new project from Eric Church since 2021’s Heart & Soul triple album. “I believe in that time-tested tradition of making records that live and breathe as one piece of art – I think it’s important.”

The closing song on the album, 'Clap Hands' is featured alongside current single 'Hands Of Time' and previously released 'Darkest Hour,' which saw the superstar signing over all of his publishing royalties to the people of North Carolina to provide immediate relief following the devastation of Hurricane Helene while also providing ongoing funds to support a more resilient future for his home state.

The arrangement on the Tom Waits' original is a relatively simple one, albeit with a skronky experimental twist, with Waits on acoustic guitar, Marc Ribot on electric lead, Tony Garnier on double bass and Michael Blair, Stephen Hodges and Bobby Previte on marimbas and various drums and percussion, and the set up on Eric Church's version is kept just as simple to begin with but Church and Jay Joyce allow the instrumentation to build as the song develops adding choirs and a string sections to the percussive backing.

Joanna Cotten provides backing vocals along with an eight piece choir, and the sound is expanded to include three violins, a trombone, a saxophone, cello, French horn and various percussion courtesy of Jay Joyce.

There are also plenty of the requisite hand claps for a song titled 'Clap Hands.'

'Clap Hands' interpolates the chanted nursery-rhyme vocal rhythm and some of the lines verbatim from 'The Clapping Song,' written by Lincoln and recorded by Shirley Ellis in 1965, which itself interpolates elements of the song 'Little Rubber Dolly' from the 1930s by the Light Crust Doughboys that also includes instructions for a clapping game.

All of these various interpolations are reimagined and refracted through Waits’ surrealist poetics while always returning to the central "clap hands" motif.

Sane, sane, they're all insane

Fireman's blind, the conductor is lame

A Cincinnati jacket and a sad luck dame

Hangin’ out the window with a bottle full of rain

Clap hands, clap your hands Clap hands

While Waits had always been known for his unique lyrics, he felt like he had hit an impasse in the '80s when he was writing for Rain Dogs.

"I was cutting off a very small piece of what I wanted to do," he told Playboy magazine. "I wasn't getting down the things I was really hearing and experiencing."

As a consequence, he began to take a more stream-of-conscious approach lyrically to his songwriting, relying on my symbolism and disassociated fragments than cohesive narrative arcs. As a result, it's often fairly fruitless trying to fix any one meaning to his work around this time.

A lot of the song seems to be set in urban New York and populates itself with the characters and eccentricities of the city: a blind firefighter, a lame bus conductor and various other characters appear throughout the song.

Roar, roar the thunder and the roar

Son of a bitch is never comin' back here no more

Moon in the window and a bird on a pole

Can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal

Clap hands, clap hands Clap your hands, clap hands

Elements of the lyrics seem to come back to a theme of the working classes being recruited as soldiers and sent to fight overseas in wars, in this case the wealthy classes are able to avoid the dangers of combat and cover the work the working classes were doing back home before they were sent overseas.

I said steam, steam, a hundred bad dreams

Goin' up to Harlem with a pistol in his jeans

Fifty-dollar bill inside of Paladin's Hat

Ain’t nobody's sure where Mr. Knickerbocker's at

This verse refers to a character who is traveling up to the New York City district of Harlem with a firearm. The "Paladin's Hat" could refer to the type of headwear worn by Richard Boone as Paladin in the Western TV series Have Gun Will Travel or possibly the original Paladins, also called the Twelve Peers; twelve legendary knights from Charlemagne's court, or the more general term "paladin" meaning a medieval man of honour.

"Mr. Knickerbocker" seems to be a reference to another street character. It's not known whether this is the same 'Mr Knickerbocker' that Barney the Purple Dinosaur sings about in his popular children's rap about a silly man who likes to boppity-bop, but it seems unlikely.

Roar, roar the thunder and the roar

Son of a bitch is never comin' back here no more

Moon in the window and a bird on a pole

Always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal

Clap hands, clap hands Clap your hands, clap hands

I said steam, steam, a hundred bad dreams

Goin' up to Harlem with a pistol in his jeans

Fifty-dollar bill inside a Paladin's Hat

Ain’t nobody's sure where Mr. Knickerbocker's at

Shine, shine a Roosevelt dime

All the way to Baltimore and runnin' out of time

Salvation Army seemed to wind up in a hole

They all went to Heaven in a little rowboat

Clap hands, clap your hands

Clap your hands, clap hands

Clap your hands, clap hands

Clap hands, clap hands

Clap hands, clap hands

Clap hands, clap hands

Although he hasn't spoken directly about his version of Tom Waits' 'Clap Hands,' he has talked about some of the sounds of the song.

"For this album, it was very much orchestral," he explains. "There's horns, there's strings, there's background, a lot of choir, and it was an interesting process to record because we had so many people in the room and you know as opposed to five or six people end up having, you know, 50, 60 people in the room. It just made it more involved with a lot of the other instrumentation that was going on."

"And also, I'm a big fan of the old orchestral and choral involvement, like from years ago. I think that that music was pretty good in the 1600s and it can still be pretty good now. But I just love those using those instrumentations that a lot of people don't use in modern commercial music, but are still very much involved with how you paint a song, how you paint the colors on a song, and that was the most fun for me. I've never done it, and we decided to take this album and play it that way from a creative standpoint."

Sane, sane, they're all insane

Fireman's blind, the conductor is lame

A Cincinnati jacket and a sad luck dame

Hangin’ out the window with a bottle full of rain

Clap hands, clap your hands Clap hands

Roar, roar the thunder and the roar

Son of a bitch is never comin' back here no more

Moon in the window and a bird on a pole

Can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal

Clap hands, clap hands Clap your hands, clap hands

I said steam, steam, a hundred bad dreams

Goin' up to Harlem with a pistol in his jeans

Fifty-dollar bill inside of Paladin's Hat

Ain’t nobody's sure where Mr. Knickerbocker's at

Roar, roar the thunder and the roar

Son of a bitch is never comin' back here no more

Moon in the window and a bird on a pole

Always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal

Clap hands, clap hands Clap your hands, clap hands

I said steam, steam, a hundred bad dreams

Goin' up to Harlem with a pistol in his jeans

Fifty-dollar bill inside a Paladin's Hat

Ain’t nobody's sure where Mr. Knickerbocker's at

Shine, shine a Roosevelt dime

All the way to Baltimore and runnin' out of time

Salvation Army seemed to wind up in a hole

They all went to Heaven in a little rowboat

Clap hands, clap your hands

Clap your hands, clap hands

Clap your hands, clap hands

Clap hands, clap hands

Clap hands, clap hands

Clap hands, clap hands

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