My first
exposure to the insanely gravelly voice of Tom Waits (over the end credits of
the Al Pacino film Sea of Love, where
Tom sings the title song) led me to assume that he looked something like
Bleeding Gums Murphy from The Simpsons.
I was mistaken, but I wanted to hear that voice again and eventually got into
Waits’s music; from his beginnings as a humble piano man to his gradual
transformation into a fearless musical experimenter who combined his old style
with a love of loud clangs and booms. There are many sides to Tom Waits –
balladeer, jazzman, blues singer, crazy person – and the album I think
illustrates this best is 1999’s Mule
Variations.
Tom’s albums
tend to bring to mind a particular place (his early albums evoked seedy bars and
dark alleyways), and Mule Variations is
no different; it sounds like it was recorded on an abandoned farm in a field
somewhere. A lot of the tracks have a blues flavour to them, and you can
imagine Tom strumming casually on the porch while someone accompanies him on an
upside-down bucket. Most of these songs, like “Get Behind the Mule”, “Cold
Water”, and “Filipino Box Spring Hog”, sound like they could have been made up
on the spot and are all the better for it. We also get one of Tom’s traditional
spoken word pieces, the darkly humorous “What’s He Building in There?”, which
is told from the perspective of a nosy neighbour peering through the blinds at
the suspicious man living next door (although the narrator ultimately comes
across as far more sinister than the person he is spying on).
These are
strong tracks, but what really makes the album for me are the ballads, which
usually feature Tom accompanying himself on piano. Despite his frequent forays
into experimentation, Waits is a balladeer at heart; had he been born a few
decades earlier, Tom probably would have worked out of an office on Tin Pan
Alley writing songs for Frank Sinatra and others (the best evidence of this is
probably Tom’s 1982 album One from the
Heart). The ballads on Mule
Variations are arguably some of the finest Waits his written: “Hold On”, “House
Where Nobody Lives”, “Pony”, “Picture in a Frame”, “Georgia Lee”, “Take it With
Me”, and the triumphant “Come on up to the House” (my favourite) are all just
lovely, managing to be beautiful and moving without becoming overly
sentimental. I can’t help but wonder what they would have sounded like with a
full Nelson Riddle-style orchestra behind them, but that would probably have
jarred with the raw sound of the album.
This is my
favourite Tom Waits album, and I highly recommend it. Tom Waits is a real Marmite
musician – his eccentric style means people are either instantly repelled or
left hungry for more – but if you like your music gritty with more than a few rough
edges, this album is for you.
