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.

Noble Beast

Face it: you probably weren’t excited about the new Andrew Bird album. It’s just not a thing one does in relation to Bird’s music. You may have been keenly interested to hear it (as I was), you may have awaited its release with deep, even forbidden desire, but the word “excited” probably didn’t really come up, did it? Bird’s just not that exciting. Which is not to say he’s bad – far from it. But you don’t line up at midnight to buy his albums at a store that’s staying open late specifically to sell them to you.

Nope. You walk in, quietly, you find Noble Beast on the shelf, and you buy it. Then you go home, not in any  particular hurry, and you maybe throw it on now or maybe you wait. You should certainly wait until you can hear the whole thing from start to finish.

So far, Noble Beast is the most accurate album title of 2009. Like all of Andrew Bird’s work, there’s a certain regal grace to the thing. And it’s a big, dense, odd, beautiful beast of a record.

Andrew Bird doesn’t really rock out, so there’s not much above midtempo on Noble Beast (Bird’s best song, “Fiery Crash,” from 2007′s pretty good Armchair Apocrypha, could be played at quite high volume in a room full of cardiac patients and not really thrust anyone’s blood pressure into the danger zone). No, the thrills provided here are of a much subtler nature. But they’re here.

“Oh No” opens and sets the tone for Noble Beast: lots of lush strings, some gentle acoustic guitar, and Andrew Bird’s stellar tenor singing about walking “arm in arm with all the harmless sociopaths”, the kind of rhythmic wordplay that Bird has perfected (and which he really shoots his load on in “Anonanimal” with some stream-of -consciousness spiel about his enemy seeing a sea anenome). Bird’s wit is sharp and dry, like Eleanor Roosevelt’s shin bones would be if you dug ‘em right now, though Bird’s wit is probably less brittle.

It took me a long time to get into Noble Beast, but now, having done so, I really can’t get out. This album is beautiful the way Pitchfork mistakenly thinks Sufjan Stevens’ music is beautiful. These 14 tracks are hyper-intelligently composed but never self-indulgent, absolutely saturated with complex melodies and played with an economy of instrumentation that the geography-crazed Mr. Stevens should probably look into. You may only hear an electric guitar for a few bars on a song, but it comes in, does its job, then clocks out and goes home. On Noble Beast, Bird has composed a pop masterwork; “Masterswarm” and the superb “Anonanimal” have tangible movements to them, making them pop songs composed like classical suites. It’s a feat that would seem pretentious in the hands of more assuming performers (I know I’ve bagged on Sufjan Stevens a lot in this review, but I’m going to continue to do so. His compositions are bloated. I don’t give a shit about a 23 track album where some tracks are 30 seconds of glockenspiel or whatever. Write a fucking song.), but it’s hard to think of a less assuming performer than Andrew Bird.

Because the songs are so tightly composed, they’re not what you’d call radio-friendly. If you need a hook in the first 30 seconds, you might not like Noble Beast, but if you have some patience, melodies like the chorus of  “Not a Robot, But a Ghost” will grab you from behind, spin you around, and plant a big ol’ kiss on your psyche. Am I gushing over this album? Maybe, but maybe Noble Beast is as good as I say it is. In the past, and with the exception of The Mysterious Production of Eggs, I’ve gotten tired/bored about halfway through Andrew Bird albums. I fully expected that with Noble Beast as well. What I did not expect was that, within two rotations in the car, I would find myself coming back to Noble Beast again and again, patiently awaiting the soft shower of beauty it is all too willing to rain upon me. If Mysterious Production of Eggs was Bird’s accessible, poppy album, Noble Beast is his coming-out as a music nerd’s music nerd. You don’t have to share my love of music theory to enjoy Noble Beast, but my love of theory and composition does add an extra dollop of whipped cream to the hot fudge sundae that is this album.

Call it the Boxer Effect. When that album came out in the early part of 2007, I heard “Fake Empire” and had an orgasm. But I didn’t really get into the rest of the album until much later, when songs like “Mistaken for Strangers” and “Apartment Story” crept into my skull while I wasn’t looking. Suddenly, Boxer was my favorite album of the year and The National became one of my favorite bands. Andrew Bird has sped up the Boxer Effect exponentially with Noble Beast. I’ve had this album for one week as of this writing and I’m going through it for possibly the 12th time.  And each time, I find new melodic treasures, so much so that I wonder now if I have suddenly understood Andrew Bird in an entirely new light. Perhaps I can go back and listen to the second half of Armchair Apocrypha without nodding off. Perhaps not.

If you’ve read other reviews of Noble Beast and find this one to be the most effusive, I can only hope that it is. Andrew Bird has completely won me over with this album, literally startled me with its beauty. If you’ve been reading Bollocks! regularly over the last year, 1) thanks! and 2) you might realize that I don’t easily go gooey over albums that aren’t by Tom Waits, The Clash, or The Hold Steady, and that might mean Noble Beast is worth some investigation on your part. That said, this album, like all Andrew Bird’s albums, will try the patience of a lot of listeners who might well write to me and tell me I’m full of shit (I have dear friends who will probably hate this album), but if you’re willing to bear with it for a while, it will pay off handsomely.