Best Albums of My Life #2: Mule Variations

There are a couple of things that even Pitchfork and I can agree on. #1: the Hold Steady is awesome. #2: you won’t “write a song as good as Tom Waits’ very worst song. Sorry, you just won’t.” They wrote that about the first Tom Waits album I ever heard, 1999′s Mule Variations. And, to this day, it’s the one sentence in all of Pitchfork’s history with which I agree word for word.

I first encountered Mr. Waits on an episode of VH1′s Storytellers and I was immediately struck by how awesome his stories were and how little they had to do with the songs he was performing. And the songs! Sweet Jesus, the first time I heard “House Where Nobody Lives”, I think I had an experience like the Mormon missionaries try to sell you about divine revelation. Here was a dude who was speaking the truth in a way I’d never heard anyone speak it before. I ran out and purchased Mule Variations immediately. That was ten years ago and my copy has seen better days, but it spins just fine and still resonates just as deeply.This album, like many Tom Waits albums, is the real shit – the deep down, bloody, muddy, messy, broken, gospel of sinners, whores, bums, ruffians, ne’er-do-wells, and basically everyone else.

What is it about Waits that’s so goddamn impressive? His songs are journeys, for starters. And, though they are full of specificity (including street names and weather, things Waits views as essential to good songs), they strike a universal chord. Take “Tom Traubert’s Blues”, for example: you don’t have to have actually been somewhere where no one speaks English and everything’s broken to understand exactly how he feels. Right? Waits intuitively understands broken-hearted, busted-ass loneliness and the anguish he howls from the rooftops is our anguish – a friend of mine in college said that Waits is crying so that you don’t have to. You couldn’t do it that well anyway. And that’s due in large part to his voice. I know, I know, a lot of people are all “Tom Waits can’t sing” or “his voice sounds funny” or “he sounds like Cookie Monster” but what they don’t understand is that for what Tom Waits is trying to tell you (about you, about us, about nasty, brutish, and short fucking life), ordinary voices are useless. I’d go so far as to say that they are insultingly inadequate. For the heartache and, yes, the joy that Waits is bringing on his tunes, you need a voice that’s a still-beating heart being tossed into a wood chipper in the middle of a nuclear war. You need a voice that took a stiff shot of whiskey and chewed up the glass. You need exactly the voice that only Tom Waits has. Do you really wanna hear Josh Groban inviting you to come on up to the house when “the only thing that you can see/ is all that you lack”? No. No, you don’t.

Mule Variations is full of some of Waits’s best busted-ass moments, too. On “Get Behind the Mule” (this is how Waits encourages perseverance – he’s not gonna tell you you’re beautiful no matter what they say and that words can’t bring you down; there’s no time for that in the Tom Waits universe. You’ve gotta get up and get to work, just like the rest of us), he gave me a line that resonated through pretty much every failed romance of my life since I first heard it: “Big Jack Earl was 8 foot one/ and he stood in the road and he cried/ he couldn’t make her love him/ couldn’t make her stay/ but tell the good lord he tried.” Again, a lot of people have probably stood in poor Jack Earl’s giant shoes. On “Cold Water”, Waits feels the pain of “pregnant women and Vietnam vets/ out there beggin’ on the freeway/ ’bout as hard as it gets”. That’s a line Bruce Springsteen would’ve sold (and/or had sex with) his mother to write.

But Mule Variations isn’t all gritty, bone-tired heartache, either. It also features a fair amount of that magical Tom Waits weirdness. “What’s He Building?” reads like a list of rumors Waits’s neighbors might cook up about him. “Eyeball Kid” is a circus-freak anthem complete with a telling autobiographical element: the Eyeball Kid was born on December 7, 1949, the same day as Thomas Alan Waits. Like the Eyeball Kid, Waits came here to show us how to really see. And “Filipino Box-Spring Hog” is a recipe for awesome disaster and possibly also a terrible dinner.

The thing (if there is indeed only one thing, which I kinda doubt) that makes Mule Variations a masterpiece (in a career full of them) is how easily the oddball tunes sit along side some of Waits’s finest ballads: “Picture in a Frame” features a line that I find so honest and so simply romantic that it has caused me, upon reflection, to give up writing love songs myself: “I’m gonna love you till the wheels come off.” Maybe that doesn’t grab y’all the same way it grabs me, but when the radio is crowded with people singing about how someone is their whole life or their everything or whatever, Waits’s lyric cuts me to the quick. I want to love someone till the wheels come off and, luckily, I get to. Sorry, Portugal. The Man fans, someone out there really loves terrible ol’ me. No one said life is fair.

And then there’s “Georgia Lee”, a piano ballad about a girl who was murdered. I love that Waits doesn’t just make a tug for your heart strings here. He does nothing less than call God out for dropping the ball: “Why wasn’t God watching?/ Why wasn’t God listening?/ Why wasn’t God there/ for Georgia Lee?”  It’s clear, then, that Tom Waits doesn’t just understand romantic loss. He understands the feeling of being massively, cosmically fucked over, and he can howl that pain for you too. Is it overstating it to suggest that Waits is out there, strolling the universe, absorbing some of the hits for all of us? Maybe; but when I listen to his stuff, I’m not so sure. This is my gospel music, kids – and Mule Variations closes with a kick-drum stomping spoonful of raw spirituality called “Come On Up to the House,” where Pastor Tom tells us to “come down off the cross/ we can use the wood” and reminds us “the world is not my home/ I’m just passing through.” Is that corny? So be it; after my sister died last year, this was one of the songs that picked me back up, that let me laugh and cry at the same time. So for me, Tom Waits’s music has real healing power, the kinda stuff some people find in church and other people find in a bottle.

If a major criterion for being the voice of your generation (or any generation) is being able to tap into the hopes, joys, loves, and fears of that generation with a profound understanding (is that a major criterion? I should hope so), then it might be time to consider that Tom Waits is the true voice of at least one generation and probably of many generations. Sure, he’s not as glamorous as Kanye West and he doesn’t want the job nearly as bad as Kanye does, but his music is 9000 times more honest. In my lifetime, Tom Waits has made some of the most heart-wrenchingly meaningful music I have heard and Mule Variations is my favorite of his albums not just because it’s amazing, but also because it was my gateway into the man’s entire body of work. It has shown me the way to songs that have seen me through pretty much every high and low point of my life for the last ten years.

The Living and the Dead

If you can’t tell by the accent (I couldn’t), Jolie Holland hails from Texas. She sings like she’s from one of Tom Waits’ stranger dreams, with a musical style of pronunciation that lands her somewhere between Jesca Hoop and Joanna Newsom (not bad company, that.) 2006′s Springtime Can Kill You was one of the most underrated albums of that year and now Holland is back with the beautiful and comparitively straightforward The Living and the Dead which features two awesome guitary guests: Matt Ward (aka M. Ward aka the Him in She & Him) and Mister Marc Fucking Ribot (the most underrated guitar-player in modern music, responsible for some of the awesomely weird licks in Tom Waits stuff and a player on the occasional Elvis Costello tune).

Of the Jolie Holland albums I’ve heard, The Living and the Dead strikes me as the most personal to date, with a fair amount of these songs discussing faces from her past, both lovers and friends. “Corrido Por Buddy” is a heartbreaking true story of a junkie-friend of Holland’s who was so wasted away she couldn’t recognize him until he said her name. Seeing her long lost pal in this condition, Holland (who excels in empathizing with all the characters in her songs, much like the afore-mentioned Mr. Waits) can only say, “I wish I’d been/ a better friend.”

Albums so laden with tunes about death and loss of love can get too heavy too quickly and tumble into an abyss of unlistenability. Holland never allows The Living and the Dead to go there because the album is shot through with a wry, weary humor, best exemplified by this line in “Sweet Loving Man”: “That dark horse you’re riding/ has to carry me too”.  There are genuine bright spots as well, such as “Your Big Hands,” which features M. Ward playing what is basically the opening lick to “Honky Tonk Women.” “Your Big Hands” is “Honky Tonk Women,” if one of the women sang back to Mick Jagger, “I’ve got a bunch of stories/ I should’ve never told.” On her website, Holland says that “Your Big Hands” is a song that “Daniel Johnston made me feel brave enough to write,” and even calls the song “terribly naive.” Anyone familiar with Daniel Johnston’s work (and you should be) will get the comparison upon hearing “Your Big Hands.”

The instrumentation on The Living and the Dead runs the gamut from the country/folk of opener “Mexico City” to the classic rock of “Your Big Hands,” and Matt Ward gets credit for helping “shape the sound” of many of the tunes on this album, which leads me to this conclusion: if you’re hanging out with M. Ward these days, you’re probably pretty awesome.  The dude’s fingers are in some pretty awesome pies this year, not least of which was his album with Zooey Deschanel under the name of She & Him.

The Living and the Dead quiets down considerably after “Your Big Hands,” but it doesn’t lose any of its steam. The masterpiece of the back half of the album is “Love Henry,” an old tune that, according to Bob Dylan (who should know), predates the Bible.  It’s a song about a woman who murders her lover and is left singing to the parrot, who thinks it will be the next victim of her viciousness: “I won’t fly down/ I can’t fly down/ and light on your right knee/ a girl who’d murder her own true love/ would kill a little bird like me.” It’s a funny image for a murder scene, but Holland never plays it for laughs. In her hands, it’s a full-on tragedy, from the perspective of a talking bird who witnesses a murder.

Holland follows that slap-happy number with the heartbreaking (and heartbroken – Holland reports “really kind of crying and holding on to the piano” while writing it) “The Future,” with it sad refrain of “Hey, come on/ and wake up with me.” It’s a beautiful song for sure, but following an ancient murder-ballad, it makes for a depressing several minutes of your day. So what does Holland do to end the album?

She laughs her way through “Enjoy Yourself,” a very simple song that got stuck in my head after I saw Synecdoche, New York (It’s one of the most depressing and most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen) this weekend. It’s only one line: “Enjoy yourself/ It’s later than you think.” Whether that’s later in the night or later in life, I don’t really know, but if The Living and the Dead and Charlie Kaufman’s new opus (which honestly couldn’t have less in common with one another) could unify to convince me of one thing, it’s this: you have limited time. Make the most of it. Watch Charlie Kaufman movies and listen to Jolie Holland albums.

At Mount Zoomer

Wolf Parade is responsible for 3 of the best songs of 2005. In no particular order, they are “Shine A Light,” “This Heart’s On Fire,” and “Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts.” It’s with that good ol’ 20/20 hindsight that I see this and, in the three intervening years, I’ve had plenty of time to build up my expectations for the follow-up to the album upon which those songs appeared, Apologies to the Queen Mary. Sure, I could’ve gotten lost in the glut of side projects that Wolf Parade vocalists Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug have between them, but why bother? I wanted the old Wolf Parade magic again, the real stuff, accept no substitutes, etc.

So now I guess I’ve got it. Wolf Parade released At Mount Zoomer in June, having only recently retitled it from Kissing the Beehive, which is the album’s closing track. After three years, Wolf Parade has graced us with… um… nine tracks. Yes, one of them is nearly 11 minutes long, but Great George Carlin’s ghost! Albums are fucking pricey these days (you can get like 2 gallons of gas for the cost of an album nowadays) and kids who are socking away the money they earn from selling their Ritalyn prescription to classmates might be tempted to invest elsewhere when confronted with a 9-track album. Nine Inch Nails just gave fans 10 songs for free, for example. Free albums definitely help you manage expectations.

If I sound disappointed by At Mount Zoomer, it’s because, initially, I was. Apologies to the Queen Mary was produced by Modest Mouse mastermind (mastermouse?) Isaac Brock and it smacked of his warped pop sensibilities. Initially, At Mount Zoomer is a lot less accessible than it’s predecessor. It’s not without it’s charms – far from it, in fact. Each listen yields new rewards. Wolf Parade, obstinate Canucks that they are, have tried to craft an album in an age of singles. There are individually outstanding tracks on At Mount Zoomer, but the full effect of the album is not felt unless you play the sucker through from start to finish. I didn’t have any favorites until about my fourth time through it (for the record, they are “Language City”, “California Dreamer,” and “Fine Young Cannibals”) It’s not a concept album, but it does have a dreamy, poppy vibe that is best experienced by listening to each of the 9 tracks in the order they are provided. At Mount Zoomer is a thumb in the eye of our national attention span and I, for one, am grateful. If this album scares fratty kids away from their show in a couple of weeks, so much the better (although it must be said that in LA, fratty/sorority type kids find their way into every show – three such tramp-stamped sorority sisters nearly ruined an Ani DiFranco show for my girlfriend and I earlier this year).

The attempt to make an essentially single-less album did not, thankfully, prevent Wolf Parade from employing their various melodic gifts. “California Dreamer,” one of the highlights of the album, is melody-rich, psychedelic trip with twangy, 60′s style guitar and sinister synthesizers in the background. And, it features a guitar solo straight out of the Marc Ribot playbook (dude’s ears must be burning – I’ve mentioned him in two straight reviews, but if you know his work and you listen to “California Dreamer,” and the entire new Old Haunts record, you’ll agree with me. Or you’re an idiot).

At Mount Zoomer is, like Apologies to the Queen Mary, a record unstuck in time: it’s entirely new but it incorporates conventions from various decades in music history. At Mount Zoomer manages to blend the 60′s pop and surf sounds with 80′s synthpop in a way that is entirely more pleasing than the combination might initially sound (seriously – if I told you my band sounded like Jan and Dean, The Cars, and a dash of Bowie, you’d puke, right? You just did!). The guitar work on At Mount Zoomer that is not “Ribot-esque” is either Talking Heads or the Cars, depending on the track. The fact that there is a track called “Fine Young Cannibals,” on the album does little to refute my claim that At Mount Zoomer is a blender for pop decades – the song has the aforementioned Cars-style riffs but it is not, as far as I can tell, about the one-hit wonder band from the 1980′s who brought us the gem, “She Drives Me Crazy.” (Note: “She Drives Me Crazy” is not really a gem)

At the risk of contradicting myself (which, I know, human beings never do), the fact that four of the nine tracks on At Mount Zoomer pass the five minute mark helps balance out the fact that there are only 9 songs on the record. More songs of such length would make the album unwieldy and the nine represented here do fit together pretty seamlessly, from “Soldier’s Grin,” right on through “Kissing the Beehive.” I complain more about artists who record every fucking idea they have (are you reading this, Ryan Adams?) than artists who give me a short, sweet set of near-perfection. Okkervil River, Band of Horses, TV On The Radio, and My Morning Jacket have all released albums of the ten-songs-or less variety and they’ve all been superb.

At Mount Zoomer will probably not win too many new fans to Wolf Parade’s side, but it’s a satisfying follow-up to a fantastic debut and, having scoped out some of their live stuff on the merry ol’ internet, I’m definitely looking forward to these songs live in a tiny little space that is entirely free of fratdicks.