Tom Waits

Until 1999's Mule Variations, this 1976 LP was the highest charting Tom Waits release, reaching a modest No. 89 on Billboard. It was also his biggest early critical score, compiling a set of string-soft drunkards' ballads and scatting jazz pop that fully embraced the graveled "zoobie-zabie" yowling for which he is so loved. Listen for classics in "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)" and "I Wish I Was in New Orleans," and hints of the kind of rawboned accompaniment that would drive late-career releases on the drums-only "Pasties and a G-String."

The people who populate Tom Waits' songs are deeply rooted in 20th-century American
mythology. They come from tough-guy novels, pulp magazines, radio serials and film noir.
Waits isn't interested in the heroes of this fiction, but with the people who exist on its
fringes: cabbies, newsstand dealers, shoeshine boys and all-night waitresses. In the
perverted language of American politics, they are known as "the little people," b... More >

Waits has developed into such a horrible singer that sometimes I think his stentorian emotionalism is deliberate, like the clinkers he hits in "The Piano Has Been Drinking." This doesn't affect his monologue songs one way or the other, but it tends to detract from those with melodies. (Grade: B-)