For those who are following, I expressed a deep regret: I’d never given raspy-voiced industrial folk star Tom Waits a chance.  Aside from a few marijuana-inspired laugh sessions listening to “Underground” I’d, for some reason (blame my mother’s Mannheim Steamroller obsession when I was little) written T. Waits off.

Until this previous week when my lovely girlfriend, genius that she is, inquired, “Wait, you’ve never listened to Tom Waits.”  Quite quickly, I found a copy of Closing Time and devoured it, wrote about it, and then moved forward, somehow landing on this Wait’s 1999 studio album Mule Variations.

Where Closing Time is a seductive bit of dimly lit barroom lovin’, Muletime Variations is Wait’s raspy folkin’ self fully realized.  Perched atop a termite-eaten porch, twangy steel guitar in hand, Wait’s seems to rock back and forth, a discarded metal yard looming in the background.  This is the backwood folk of an earlier time re-filtered through a crackpot microphone on a broke-down railroad car with Mr. Waits himself seated behind it, conductor hat firmly in place.

A madcap ride indeed.

Tom Waits - Cold Water