Be honest.  No Googling.  How many of you know who Tom Waits is, beyond a vague association with music or acting?  And if you know who he is at all, what kind of musician do you think he is?  (These are honest questions; feel free to answer in comments, even if the answer is “I’ve never heard of him” or “You’re an idiot for never having heard of him.”)

The wife and I have been marathoning Season 2 of Orange is the New Black, and for only the second time the closing musical number of a show has gotten me to spend money on music.  (The first was an episode of Defiance that closed with Civil Twilight’s amazing cover of Nirvana’s Come As You Are.  The weirdest thing that’s ever led to me spending money on music was hearing Jeffrey Gaines’ cover of In Your Eyes over the in-store sound system in a Chipotle and insisting that the manager tell me what the hell they were playing.)

Anyway.  Right.  So the seventh or eighth episode of OitNB Season Two ends with a substantial portion of Waits’ Come On Up to the House playing.  It’s an awesome freaking song, and since I was in an expansive mood (and I love new music) I downloaded the entire album it was on, on the spot.  I had heard of Waits, but mostly because he was awesome in Mystery Men, one of the most underrated movies ever.  I had a vague idea that he was a bluesman; Come On Up to the House is certainly bluesy.

Guys, I’ve listened to Mule Variations three goddamn times now.  Tom Waits is either the greatest musician of all time or an assault on the very concept of music itself.  I don’t know which.

First things first: the damn album is called Mule Variations, for fuck’s sake.  Do mules vary?  I don’t know.  I think mules are pretty much just mules.  It’s a clue, though, as to how the album is going to go; he took two words that don’t belong together and slapped them together to make a word-salad phrase that, grammatically at least, ought to make sense but doesn’t.  I listened to the first half of this album on the way home from OtherJob and I honestly don’t know how the hell I made it home because I was so confused.

You’ve seen Belushi’s impression of Joe Cocker, right?  Here, just in case the answer was no:

(Crap, it won’t embed right, and I can’t find it on YouTube.  Click.)

Okay.  Now imagine what it would be like if Joe Cocker did an impression of John Belushi doing an impression of Joe Cocker.

That’s what Tom Waits sounds like.  His voice is like nothing I’ve ever heard; he sounds like he’s just growling for half of the songs and it’s rarely immediately clear what the hell he’s saying.  You want to do a credible Tom Waits impression?  Gargle.  I’m fucking serious.  And it’s probably better if you’re gargling bourbon instead of water.  Although I feel like that has at least a chance of killing you so you probably shouldn’t do it.  It’s as if Leonard Cohen and Junior Kimbrough beat each other to death and somebody stitched a zombie singer together with the parts that still sorta worked right, soaked it in brine, and animated it, only then the zombie got cancer of the vocal cords. I’ve never heard anything like it.

Get used to that sentence.

The production on the album is the dirtiest nastiest filthiest stuff I’ve ever heard, and I think I mean that as a compliment.  There’s at least one track where the vocals and the music simply do not match at all.  Like there were two different producers completely, and they weren’t allowed to talk to each other.  Track 8 is called What’s He Building In There?. It’s a spoken-word track.  Imagine that Pink Floyd vomited on Allan Ginsberg.  Other tracks are called– I am not making this up– Eyeball Kid and Filipino Box Spring Hog, which makes absolutely no goddamned sense at all.  Filipino Box Spring Hog may actually involve a DJ.

There is a track where I’m pretty sure a string breaks on someone’s guitar partway through, and they just kept going and left it in.  On another, there’s a loud thump at one point, like someone in the studio dropped a heavy box. They left it in.

I have never heard anything like this.

I don’t know what the hell any of this shit is.

Go download it.