I have two records each by Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits, songwriters who I estimate influenced me about equal from my early teens onward. Leonard Cohen's apocalypse is a cruel romance and Tom Waits' apocalypse in a carnivalesque junkyard. A balanced person really needs a little of both those modalities circulating through the greater constellation of systems.
Leonard Cohen, "Famous Blue Raincoat"
Tom Waits, "Hold On"
Mule Variations is the best all-around long-player from Mr. Waits. It were as though what used to be only the dwarf and the bearded lady on their lonesome is now the whole dang circus. Franks Wild Years came close, but Mule Variations, right on time for Y2K, sealed the deal consummate. For a string-mangler like me, however, Rain Dogs is the mandatory Waits disk 'cause it features the legendary Marc Ribot's most fearsome and adventurous playing just about ever and in a context where it serves to help transform popular forms and garland Tom Waits' patent medicines and colourful symbolist poetry. My favourite song by Tom Waits, "Kentucky Avenue," is not, however, on either of the albums I own on vinyl, but rather 1978's Blue Valentine. It's the most sublime imagistic inventory you could ever ask for. It's like a psychedelic grocery list.
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