Tom Waits, in the hierarchy of my tastes, ends up fitting into about the same slot as David Bowie: fantastic in theory, but with fewer instances of making albums I love than I feel like there should be. If I start thinking about albums, I have to think a lot when I try to consider how many I actually have strong feelings for, and the gap between how much I enjoy him in theory and how much I instinctually enjoy his albums in practice gives me some pause. but when I think about Tom, I inevitably find myself thinking about him in terms of eras and a few individual songs. As a concept, Tom Waits is absolutely fantastic and without match. For lots of other people, he's just that guy with that voice, the seemingly ageless guy who gradually moved from conventional piano-based balladeering (where it seemed like he came out of the womb as a 55-year-old) to bizarre noisy rhythmic oom-pah music (well, he worked in other genres in this era too, but that was certainly his fallback) that has nothing to do with normal rock music but who somehow kept selling albums and kept getting his songs covered (and kept appearing in movies in unexpected roles). He's rightly gained a reputation as one of the coolest dudes in the history of rock music, and he's practically a deity among "hipsters" and people whose music tastes tend to center just outside the mainstream of rock. I once saw Tom Waits described as "my favorite artist that I never feel like listening to," and I feel like there's a grain of truth there.
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