Tom Waits
Twenty-five years ago, for his second album, The Heart of Saturday Night, Tom Waits wrote a song about “fumblin’ with the blues.” And though he’s since been acclaimed as a jazz raconteur, a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith for Skid Row, and a hobo sapient a la Harry Partch, both his fumbles and his successes have come out of a long, rambling sojourn to the blues’ brackish backcountry heart. With his long-awaited new Mule Variations, an extended suite of songs as spare, direct, and elemental as any in his catalog, he seems to have arrived.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Waits bellied up to the bar more boldly on The Heart of Saturday Night, and again on Nighthawks at the Diner in 1975. Tunes like “New Coat of Paint” and “Eggs and Sausage” were swanky small-combo strolls that sounded like they were lifted from jazz-blues fakebooks of the 50s. By the time Waits coughed up the twin monuments of his vagabond years, Small Change (1976) and Foreign Affairs (1977), he was actually calling what he did the blues: “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” “Invitation to the Blues.”
Mule Variations, Waits’s first album under his new deal with punk indie Epitaph, is “Gun Street Girl” writ large–70 minutes large. It was recorded at a chicken ranch, albeit one in northern California, and the title is inspired by a quote attributed to Robert Johnson’s father: “Trouble with Robert is he wouldn’t get behind the mule in the morning and plow.”
