Tom Waits is waiting for you at rock bottom

The thing about art- whether its books, films, music, or some perfect fourth option that we can all pretend I came up with- is that there's always more. No one reading this will ever listen to every song, or watch every film, or read every book. And that's good! It means there's always something to be explored. Your next hyper-fixation is just around the corner, waiting for you to stumble upon it. And at the ripe old age of 29, I turned a corner one day and found myself face to face with Tom Waits.

I don't think I have anything to say about Tom Waits that hasn't been said in the 50 plus years of journalism that's followed him throughout his career, but dammit, he's occupying so much residency in brain that I've got room for little else at the moment.

Mule Variations, his 1999 effort, is my main obsession at the moment. It starts off with his warbled bluesy voice crackling through a megaphone on Big In Japan, a right out of the gates signal to his listeners and critics making something immediately clear: he does not give a fuck.

I got the style but not the grace

I got the clothes but not the face

I got the bread but not the butter

I got the window but not the shutter

But I'm big in Japan

I'm big in Japan, hey, but I'm big in Japan

I'm big in Japan

With these lines opening his record, Tom maintains, "Hey, I'm not everyone's cup of tea, but someone out there's gotta like me." And hell, he's not wrong. This self-deprecating pride is one of the most attractive things about Waits's music for me. He sings about himself, both the fictionalized and the non-fictionalized versions, inserting his real self along with the vision of himself that he's curated.

With his self-depreciating beginning, we're perfectly situated for the deep slide Waits takes into the muddy underworld of this bluesy record. Horses riding their masters in "Lowside of the Road", sleeping with bugs in a graveyard in "Cold Water", and a man with a lantern who carries the soul of a woman in "Black Market Baby", Waits loves him some spooky and otherworldly imagery. The album comes to a screeching halt with the spoken word "What's He Building In There?", a lovecraftian monologue in which our protagonist convinces himself that his neighbor is, at best, a serial killer. (It also loosely pairs with the plot of The Last House On Needless Street, a book that I will never stop screaming about.)

And at the same time, because of his insertion of the "self" into these songs, we really do get the feeling that Waits has seen all that he reports. He's handled the rough and tumble of the nomadic American, has met ghosts and ghouls on the road, and has almost surely had a conversation or two with the devil. And yet, he's still kicking.

His very presence and ability to make a record lets us know that if we end up sleeping in the gutter or start seeing ghosts, Tom Waits The Legend has been there too, down at the lowest points there are. And still, he's able to find beauty. He can still write something as soft and gentle as "Hold On" or as soulfully inviting as "House Where Nobody Lives" where he says:

What makes a house grand, oh, it ain't the roof or the doors

If there's love in a house, it's a palace for sure

But without love it ain't nothin' but a house

A house where nobody lives

And if this demonic carnival barker can find beauty and truth in the mud and muck, well then shit, what's our excuse?