The Transforming Journey of Tom Waits

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 13
Tom Waits, Mule Variations

Despite his outsized influence in America’s singer-songwriter community, Tom Waits hasn’t been particularly productive throughout his career. He regularly goes five or more years between albums (at this writing, he hasn’t released any new content since 2011). At times he’s gone over a decade between tours. His singles generally don’t chart. And when he does record, his works are so eclectic, they’re impossible to market and seldom find an audience.

This, Waits’ best-selling album, won him his second Grammy award, for Best Contemporary Folk Album. On first consideration, this seems an unlikely category. The album begins with “Big In Japan,” a prime example of Waits’ screaming-and-hollering style he perfected in the late 1970s. Most lyrics on this album have a sidelong, beatnik jazz style, and the instruments have a lo-fi sound more common to indie rock than anything folk oriented.

Yet I’d contend this album captures the folk ethos perfectly. Waits picks sounds that have entered the American cultural consciousness from various genres, and have become part of our shared experience as a people. From these elements he creates a collage of distorted sound and off-kilter lyrics that reflects we, the audience, back at ourselves, just mangled enough to remind us how crooked we are, below the surface.

Designed to fill an entire CD, a feat most singer-songwriters still avoid, this album sprawls across the influences that Waits has used throughout his career. “Georgia Lee” and “”House Where Nobody Lives” have the slow-moving gait of classic country blues, while “Get Behind the Mule” and “Cold Water” have a harsher edge, a desire, seemingly, to reprimand the listener. The shift of influences seems designed to keep us back-footed.

Tom Waits

Other tracks don’t fit genre molds as easily. “What’s He Building?” is a strange prose poem with a background reminiscent of a horror film scored by Mike Oldfield. “Black Market Baby” and “Filipino Box Spring Hog” don’t sound like any established market niche, more like wall-to-wall sonic chaos captured near closing time at a bar where a band has stopped caring what the audience thinks. Waits never stops being musical, but frenzy often overcomes harmony.

Like most Waits albums, this one produced only one retail single, “Hold On.” This song more resembles the romantic baritone Waits tried to emulate in his earliest albums, which he eventually dropped. Is he deliberately trying to create something radio-friendly, to trick listeners into buying something they don’t anticipate? Perhaps. Or he’s channeling his inner San Diego middle-class youth, and the studio thought the single might sell.

Fans argue about how to interpret “Chocolate Jesus,” the track Waits famously performed on Letterman. Is Waits being deliberately sacrilegious? Is he disparaging Christianity? Waits has been notoriously elusive and contradictory about his spiritual roots. However, in light of this album’s closing track, the rip-roaring barrelhouse gospel sing-a-long “Come On Up To the House,” I’m inclined to suspect “Chocolate Jesus” reflects ambiguity about commercialized Christian trappings, not Christianity itself.

Waits didn’t assemble a studio band for this album. Instead, he employs an all-star ensemble of rotating guest artists, including Charlie Musselwhite, Les Claypool, John Hammond, and Marc Ribot. Most songs involve fewer musicians than you might expect; the dynamic sound arises from the energy of the playing, not the number of instruments being played. Waits uses multitracking far less than most contemporary artists. The result is austere, but frenetic.

Taken together, the album’s various tracks create a sonic landscape as uneven as any national park. We careen through the categories of American music, never allowed to settle on one genre long enough to get comfortable. We reach this album’s final, percussive chords, confused about where we’ve been, but confident we’ve taken a journey. The experience has certainly changed Waits, and probably us too. And we’re ready to go again.

Various record labels keep releasing Waits, but always struggle to market his genre-resistant compositions. Upon release, this album did moderately well, despite lacking support. Rolling Stone gave it three stars on initial release, but apparently changed their minds later, granting four-and-a-half stars in their later album guide, and deeming this one of the 500 most important albums ever released. Which reflects Waits’ usual reception: initial confusion, followed by acclaim.

Not everyone likes Tom Waits. His coarse voice and eclectic style often discourage new listeners. But audiences willing to persevere will find Waits an experience they revisit time and again. This album rewards multiple listening, and provides unexpected insight beneath its layers. And it is folk music, because it’s about its audience’s experience.