Waits Overlooked

Has a week passed since I last referenced Tom Waits on this blog? Probably not.

He just won election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this week. Sure, it's a dubious honor guided by the wankers by Rolling Stone. But the mainstream media has to explain Waits, and that's always entertaining.

To mark the occasion, I thought about picking 10 favorites. Instead, we'll go with 10 tracks that get overlooked.

I purposely skipped songs from Small Change and Mule Variations because most of my readers are intimately familiar with those records. I couldn't help but pick two from Rain Dogs, because Waits covers so much terrain on its 19 songs.

A Good Man is Hard to Find - ending the most depressing album he ever recorded (Blood Money), Waits manages to sound optimistic with words totally absent of hope.

Anywhere I Lay My Head --- Nineteen songs later, the climax of Rain Dogs is easy to miss. Waits constructs a brief yet strangely uplifting dirge that turns into a New Orleans funeral match. It's a wanderer's creed.

Blind Love - Pure country. A brief stop on the stylistic journey Rain Dogs takes, the fiddle-driven ballad finds Waits getting rural in a manner he never approached again. I always come back to the line, "They say if you get far enough away, you'll be on your way back home."

Cannon Song - Taken from Berthold Brecht's Threepenny Opera, Waits is only accompanied by his own beatboxing and percussion. Easily the most militaristic performance he ever recorded, and probably my favorite Waits cover. It's hard not to love the line "If the population, should treat us with indignation, we'll chop 'em up, because we like our hamburgers raw." Brecht influenced Waits 1980s stylistic turn, not to mention his brand of gallows humor.

Falling Down - the studio album cut on Big Time, Waits revived it with an exuberant live take on his 2006 and 2008 tours.

Foreign Affairs - On the title track for Waits' uneven fifth record, his poetry hits a masterful stride. This album closer sums up the dangerous and inevitability of wanderlust once you start traveling.

In the Neighborhood - I've lived in this part of town, been wedged in by the flatbeds, and seen the kids without ice cream because the market burned down. The song came on as I rolled into Clintonville a year after moving to Nashville, and never sounded more appropriate.

San Diego Serenade - The Heart of Saturday Night gets unjustly labeled as Closing Time 2.0. Not true. Despite their sonic similarities, Waits' writing has matured on this beautiful ballad and others.

Walk Away - taken from the Dead Man Walking soundtrack and resurrected for Orphans, Waits does a brutally effective vocal turn above a simple backing track of bass and primitive percussion.

Who Are You - spun from the same cloth as Hang Down Your Head and Downtown Train, this cut brims with heart and emotion, backing away from the dark depths plumbed elsewhere on Bone Machine.