1.Big In Japan 
2.Lowside Of The Road 
3.Hold On 
4.Get Behind The Mule 
5.House Where Nobody Lives 
6.Cold Water 
7.Pony 
8.What's He Building? 
9.Black Market Baby 
10.Eyeball Kid 
11.Picture In A Frame 
12.Chocolate Jesus 
13.Georgia Lee 
14.Filipino Box Spring Hog 
15.Take It With Me 
16.Come On Up To The House 

Tom Waits - vocals, The Voice (8), Guitar, Piano, Organ, percussion, Chamberlin, Optigan
    Andrew Borger - drums (9, 14, 16), Percussion (14)
    Kathleen Brennan - Boner (14)
    Ralph Carney - Trumpet (1), Sax (1, 16), Alto-Sax (11), Bass Clarinet (10), Reeds (8, 9)
    Les Claypool - Bass (1)
    Greg Cohen - Bass (11, 12, 15), Percussion (10)
    Linda Deluca-Ghidossi - Violin (13)
    Dalton Dillingham III - Bass (13)
    Joe Gore - Guitar (3, 16)
    Chris Grady - Trumpet (2, 14)
    John Hammond - Blues Harp (7)
    Stephen Hodges - Percussion (3, 4)
    Smokey Hormel - Guitar (4), Dobro (7), Chumbus & Dousengoni (2)
    Jacquire King - Programming (2, 14)
    Larry LaLonde - Guitar (1)
    Brain Mantia - Drums (1)
    Christopher Marvin - Drums (6)
    Charlie Musselwhite - Blues Harp (4, 12, 14, 16)
    Nik Phelps - Bari-Sax (11, 16)
    DJ M. Mark "The III Media" Reitman - Turntable (8, 9, 10, 14)
    Larry Rhodes - Contrabassoon (10)
    Marc Ribot - Guitar (3, 9, 10, 14), Lead Guitar (5), Guitar Solo (6, 9)
    Jeff Sloan - Percussion (8), Boner (14)
    Larry Taylor - Bass (3, 4, 5, 6, 14, 16), Guitar (14), Rhythm Guitar (5)
    Wings Over Jordan Gospel, Bali Eternal - Turntable Samples (10)

What Tom Waits does to the blues is something like what newspapers do to bright colors — in the way that a picture of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling ends up looking like roast beef in the morning edition, Waits' arty, seasick imagination turns a rural American song form into a garish, surreal fantasy.

Mule Variations, Waits' first studio album in six years, contains the most blues of any album he's made. When he plays the Southern hayseed, he wants you to feel the chicken wire, breathe the dust, see the sunsets. The amazing thing about Waits is that he's still offering up his affectations like a new singer-songwriter on the first time out, still dreaming up wild, desperate fantasy scenarios of lawless small-town America during the B-movie era. Not only are there no malls in Tom Waits' world, no computers or sport-utility vehicles, but here people cook pigs on overturned beds ("Filipino Box Spring Hog"), stir their brandy with nails ("Get Behind the Mule") and have their own curio museums ("Eyeball Kid").

If you don't buy Waits' maudlin gusto, this record won't change your mind. But if you're a fan — especially of his 1992 album, Bone Machine — you'll get your long-awaited fix. Continuing Bone Machine's experiments in artfully scuffed sound (though, regretfully, doing away with the first-take immediacy of the earlier record), Waits has found DJs this time to help him build his sonic doghouses, with scratches, hisses and gabbling field recordings. And Waits, as producer, has made his lurching stomps sound like they were deep-fried before they reached the mastering plant.

There are some fine songs here, especially "Take It With Me," a ballad about the strength of memory after the dissolution of a relationship that states the obvious in a particularly beautiful way. The problem is that it's more of the same; Waits seems to have peaked as a songwriter with 1985's Rain Dogs, and he's still writing outtakes from that record. (Too many of his rattled-off story-blues numbers on the new album sound like "Gun Street Girl"; too many of the ballads sound like "Time.")

Through his film roles in the Eighties and Nineties and the simultaneous rise of an alternative culture that lionizes him, Waits has become the apotheosis of the American eccentric. We don't demand much from these figures, other than that they spill out their visions in chunks of an ongoing discourse; Mule Variations is just the latest installment of that discourse, and one wonders when Waits, who's not lacking for bold, dislocating ideas, might treat himself to a new start. ---Ben Ratliff, rollingstone.com

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A1 	Goin' Down Slow 	2:48
A2 	Poncho's Lament 	4:17
A3 	I'm Your Late Night Evening Prostitute 	3:16
A4 	Had Me A Girl 	5:32
A5 	Ice Cream Man 	3:12
A6 	Rockin' Chair 	3:15
B1 	Virginia Ave. 	2:41
B2 	Midnight Lullabye 	3:37
B3 	When You Ain't Got Nobody 	3:24
B4 	Little Trip To Heaven 	3:01
B5 	Frank's Song 	1:56
B6 	Looks Like I'm Up Shit Creek Again 	3:03
B7 	So Long I'll See Ya 	3:31

Tom Waits - Composer, Guitar, Piano, Primary Artist, Vocals

The Early Years, Vol. 1 is an album of early demos recorded by a 21-year-old Tom Waits in 1971, two years before the release of his first album, Closing Time, and issued on the record label owned by his ex-manager. Waits accompanies himself on piano or guitar and sings in an unaffected nasal tenor. (One track, "Ice Cream Man," is given a full-band treatment.) Several of these songs, notably "Ice Cream Man," "Virginia Ave.," "Midnight Lullabye," and "Little Trip to Heaven," turned up on his later albums, but the overall level of writing and performance is well below Waits' usual standard. Clearly, his better early material was chosen for his Asylum albums. Hardcore fans will want to hear this album, of course, but others need not bother. ---William Ruhlmann, AllMusic Review

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1. I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You 
2. Ol' 55 
3. Mockin' Bird 
4. In Between Love 
5. Blue Skies 
6. Nobody 
7. I Want You 
8. Shiver Me Timbers 
9. Grapefruit Moon 
10. Diamonds on My Windshield 
11. Please Call Me, Baby 
12. So It Goes 
13. Old Shoes (& Picture Postcards)

Tom Waits - Composer, Piano, Vocals

Like its predecessor, The Early Years, Vol. 2 consists of demos recorded by Tom Waits in 1971, two years before he released his debut album, Closing Time. "Hope I Don't Fall in Love With You," "Ol' 55," "Grapefruit Moon," and "Old Shoes" later turned up on that album, while "Shiver Me Timbers," "Diamonds on My Windshield," and "Please Call Me Baby" appeared on Waits' second album, The Heart of Saturday Night, in 1974. The release of the two Early Years albums demonstrates that Waits' better early material made it onto his regular releases -- the previously unreleased stuff, while interesting, is not as good. And since Waits' albums were not overproduced, the main difference between these versions and the familiar ones is that the familiar ones are better. Still, Waits fans will enjoy hearing, for example, "Ol' 55" performed in a higher key and with an acoustic guitar backing. ---William Ruhlmann, AllMusic Review

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01 - Chicago
02 - Raised Right Men
03 - Talking @ the Same Time
04 - Get Lost						play
05 - Face to the Highway
06 - Pay Me
07 - Back in the Crowd
08 - Bad as Me
09 - Kiss Me
10 - Satisfied
11 - Last Leaf
12 - Hell Broke Luce
13 - New Year's Eve
14 - After You Die					play
+
15. She Stole the Blush
16. Tell Me
17. After You Die

Tom Waits – vocals, guitar, piano, percussion, banjo, tablas, pump organ
Marc Ribot – guitar
Clint Maedgen – saxophone
Casey Waits – drums
David Hidalgo – guitar, violin, percussion, accordion, bass, background vocals
Ben Jaffe – trombone, bass clarinet, tuba
Charlie Musselwhite – harmonica
Patrick Warren – keyboards
James Whiton – bass
Keith Richards – guitar, vocals
Augie Meyers – vox organ, piano, accordion
Gino Robair – percussion, vibraphone
Larry Taylor – guitar, bass
Chris Grady – trumpet
Flea – bass
Will Bernard – guitar
Dawn Harms – violin
Marcus Shelby – bass
Les Claypool – bass
Zack Sumner – bass

Sixty-one-year-old artists releasing the 17th studio album of their careers have normally earned the right not to make things easy for anyone. That theory should go double for song men such as Tom Waits, a bloody-minded old goat not overly given to the vagaries of commerce or fashion. He sings with a gulletful of acid reflux. He wears hats like it's 1947. There is only the one (unofficial) dubstep remix of his work online and it's not half bad.

And yet Waits's latest album is a primer of what a reality TV show host might call his best bits. It is the sort of disc you can hand to a Waits novice or sceptic with the confidence that this collection of brawlers, bawlers and bastards (as he characterised the three-way split in his work on his 2006 compilation) will do the job of conversion. All Waits is here, more or less: the barfly, the romantic, the curmudgeon, the method actor and the self-parodist. Only the clangorous experimentalist of The Black Rider is missing. Laughing along with Waits isn't hard. "Yerrr the sayme kinda bad as muy!" he yowls on the lurid, cartoonish title track, keeping up the appearance of a dissolute lowlife despite being a happily partnered-up man whose missus helps him write this stuff. Indeed, the terrific second track rues the lack of men "raised right", like someone ringing into a 5 Live phone-in.

"Satisfied" is another hoot. Taking its cue from the infamous Rolling Stones track, Waits demands satisfaction, but more in the florid style of an 18th-century duellist. "Now Mr Jagger! And Mr Richards! I will scratch where I been itching!" he blusters, as the very same Mr Richards struts and frets conspiratorially along on his guitar. Having cropped up as a guest on previous Waits albums, Richards lends a hand on four songs here, and it's easy to imagine Waits as having written "Bad As Me" as a love song to this twin soul.

For all the excellent clowning around, Bad As Me is, chiefly, an album full of compassion, anger and sorrow – the stuff that puts Waits on the same page as upstanding Bruce Springsteen and the emotional surgeon Leonard Cohen, as well as bad old Nick Cave and professional drunks the Pogues. "Pay Me" tells the story of an exile with a woozy weep that sounds both sentimentally Irish and quintessentially French. "They pay me not to come home," Waits rasps stoically. There are compromised men hitting the road here, failed relationships starting again (in "Chicago"), and lovers trying to rekindle their spark. The terrific "Kiss Me" is all vinyl hiss and jazzy antiquity, with Waits doing his gruffest bluesman growl. The warmongers and bankers get it in the neck so hard, you can't help but punch the air. "Talking at the Same Time" rues the downward turn of the economy with restrained elegance, while "Hell Broke Luce" is a lot angrier – a Waits-own rap set to left-right marching and machine gunfire. Indeed, Bad As Me's 13 tracks fairly rip along, alerting a new generation that there are few as fine as Waits. ---Kitty Empire, guardian.co.uk

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01 - New Coat Of Paint 
02 - San Diego Serenade 
03 - Semi Suite 
04 - Shiver Me Timbers 
05 - Diamonds On My Windshield 
06 - (Looking For) The Heart Of Saturday Night 
07 - Fumblin' With The Blues 
08 - Please Call Me, Baby 
09 - Depot, Depot 
10 - Drunk On The Moon 
11 - The Ghosts Of Saturday Night (After Hours At ...)

Gene Cipriano 	Clarinet
Bones Howe 	Percussion, Producer
Jim Hughart 	Bass
Shelly Manne 	Drums
Jack Sheldon 	Trumpet
Frank Vicari 	Sax (Tenor)
Tom Waits         Composer, Guitar, Piano, Vocals 

If Closing Time, Tom Waits' debut album, consisted of love songs set in a late-night world of bars and neon signs, its follow-up, The Heart of Saturday Night, largely dispenses with the romance in favor of poetic depictions of the same setting. On "Diamonds on My Windshield" and "The Ghosts of Saturday Night," Waits doesn't even sing, instead reciting his verse rhythmically against bass and drums like a Beat hipster. Musically, the album contains the same mixture of folk, blues, and jazz as its predecessor, with producer Bones Howe occasionally bringing in an orchestra to underscore the loping melodies. Waits' songs are sometimes sketchier in addition to being more impersonal, but "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night" and "Semi Suite" are the equal of anything on Closing Time. Still, with lines such as "...the clouds are like headlines/Upon a new front page sky" and references to "a 24-hour moon" and "champagne stars," Waits' imagery is beginning to get florid, and in material this stylized, the danger of self-parody is always present. ---William Ruhlmann, AllMusic Review

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