92/100 — Tom Waits — Mule Variations (1999)
Mule Variations was not my introduction to Tom Waits’ extensive and bizarre catalog, but it was my gateway into his world. And as such it is also one of the most influential albums to ever touch my life. It’s a hard album to categorize. There’s rock and roll, gospel, country, blues, carnival music, and spoken word, all filtered through an old junkyard and consumed with way too many cigarettes and shots of bad whiskey. In other words, it’s Tom Waits.
The album opened the door to another world immediately with the broken down James Brown beat-box groove of “Big in Japan” with it’s crazy list of growled-out bad luck:
I got the sizzle but not the steak
I got the boat but not the lake
I got the sheets but not the bed
I got the jam but not the bread
No one instrument owns the groove, they’re all interspersed and chopped together to make one whole, dirty, and funky (horn trills and all) piece of fun.
And then two songs later there’s the tender ballad “Hold On” with softly brushed snare drum and a tale of a woman kicked out of her home town for trying to live it up a bit and ends up dancing by herself in the snow far away from home… “but it’s so hard to dance that way, when it’s cold and there’s not music.” Enough to break my 14 year old heart the first time I heard it.
Then there’s “Cold Water” with that dirty dirty blues riff, all about being homeless but being kinda fine with it. Or “What’s He Building in There?” the spoken word piece about small town American paranoia and the perfect soundtrack to any Halloween with it’s clangs, bangs, drones, and screeches.
And of course Tom Waits’ songs are peppered with eccentric characters such as the “Eyeball Kid,” a circus freak born without a body who can still somehow “play Stravinsky on a baby grand.” Or the man who doesn’t go to church on Sunday but buys a “Chocolate Jesus” and prays to him/eats him instead while a banjo picks mournfully behind a wailing harmonica and rooster crows.
One of the things I love about Waits is his use of religion thematically in his lyrics, and Mule Variations has it spades. “Georgia Lee” questions the existence of a God in the face of a young woman’s tragic death (a crushingly sad piano ballad) while the rousing gospel stomp of “Come On Up To The House” blares out, “The world is not my home I’m just a-passin’ through.”
Tom Waits music often feels timeless. Yes, this was recording in the late 90s, but based on any one song I’d be hard pressed to date it if I didn’t know that. It’s a testament to his musical arrangements — and to that voice! — that this album continues to give me so much joy, even 15 years after I first discovered it.
Favourite Tracks: “Come On Up To The House,” “Chocolate Jesus,” “Cold Water”
Least Favourite Track: “Black Market Baby”
