Released April 16, 1999
Recorded 1998 at Prairie Sun Recording Studios in Cotati, California
Genre Rock, experimental
Length 70:33
Label ANTI-
Producer Kathleen Brennan, Tom Waits
Like most of Wait’s albums, it’s hard to assign a genre to it. His albums all have at least three songs that would fit neatly into completely separate genres, and they all have musical accents and flourishes that belong somewhere else. Having said that, Mule Variations is a blues album. If not always in music, in concept, and in it, Waits is returning to his roost like a carrier pigeon who’s just flown through no man’s land. An album off a six year hiatus, Waits seems to be comfortable writing from the American no-where. Tragic tales from the railroad tracks between towns, abandoned homes, and shrinking cities with growing ruins.
There are hints, as there would be with any artist, of what came before and what was to come in the future. Eyeball Kid smacks of Bone Machine lunacy with its Vegas-carnival characters and its jarring, aggressive, almost industrial instrumentation. And Picture in a Frame, later covered by Willie Nelson, is a hat-tip to a time before he was himself, on Closing Time and Heart of Saturday Night. And while there’s always a tint on the fringe, Mule Variations does not suffer from an identity crisis.
The heart of the album is a rustic, down-home, greasy soul that was missing in action from Bone Machine. Bereft of its big-city numbness, Mule Variations is less “in the coliseum” and more “come on up to the house.” And if Bone Machine felt like downtown LA, then Mule Variations is a band playing on the biggest pile in the junkyard.
Songs like Big in Japan, Pilipino Box Spring Hog, Get Behind the Mule, and Cold Water are the sort of groove you can only feel when you’re hangover and overdosing on bacon sold off the back of a van who doesn’t look like they wash their plates. Mule Variation jams like nobody’s bathing. Its character do DIY better than your favorite punk album, not by choice, they just don’t have the money to choose, nor the wherewithal to know they sound like a gravel throated rooster singing mariachi.
And then there are the outliers. Songs that just never fit in but, given this is a Waits album, work like anything else on the island of misfit toys. “Hold On” – which won him a Grammy – plays like a more softly, sung Springsteen song. But rather than focus on the brute fury that might come with The Boss, Waits goes for the jugular on the human aspect of everything falling away “It must be hard to dance that way” she says, “when it’s cold and there’s no music.” That line’s in the song, but it came from his daughter, watching a homeless woman dance, while they rode the bus together. And this captures a piece of Waits that eludes other writers. These characters aren’t filled with fiction, but a composite of all the low-lifes he generally hangs out with, knows, and loves.
The album closes with Come on up to the House, and its choice of location its the very best thing about this album. Its possible interpretation knows no bounds, but at the end of an album full of dead babies, broken families, paranoid suburbians, and blasphemous confestions, the album ends with an absolute show-stopper of a Gospel clap-along which, in not so many words, says “get your **** together.”
Come on up to the House is a pep talk before the second half in which the coach basically tells you you’re a worthless waste of space, but you can either cry about it or get on the junk pile with the rest of us.
Must hear:
1. Cold Water
2. Hose where nobody lives
3. Chocolate Jesus
4. Filipino Box Spring Hog
5. Come on up to the house