[Aaarg]

WHOOPS YOU GOT ME STARTED HERE'S MORE TEXT THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR

yeah he's changed a lot. his first album (closing time) is pretty boring ("ol' 55" is pretty good and the self-titled instrumental closer is good). the second (the heart of saturday night) is vastly different and i'm still on the fence about most of it. my girlfriend insists it's her favorite, but i don't know.

nighthawks at the diner is a weird one. it totally has this novelty to it (it's a pseudo-live album and he talks a lot on it) and a lot of the songs are less cohesive and more... tom waits rambling to some music. i like it a lot, but it's not the kind of album you can listen to out of order.

small change is great. the whole album is drenched in alcohol and for about a month i listened to it every night. i guess a lot of people don't like it? i don't know why.

foreign affairs is not worth checking out, ever. it's a shame, since it's directly between two albums i love. oh god, it has an embarrassingly bad duet with bette midler of all people. it's bad.

blue valentine is great. i don't even know why i like it so much, but i do. it's got tom kind of exploring different areas without being weird yet. i can't recommend this one enough, but ehhhh i'd go ahead and skip the first track "somewhere (from west side story)" because it's, uh, "somewhere." you know, from west side story.

heartattack and vine is not something i'd recommend at first. not that it's bad, it just... i don't know, it took me a while to get into anything past the first two songs, even though the later ones are good!

and then he did a soundtrack for a movie (one from the heart) and the whole album is him and crystal gayle. i guess it has some good songs, but i couldn't tell you which. there's one song that i like a lot, but the album version is sung by gayle and it's awful. there's another one that tom sings... and it's not on here.

aaaaaand then he was off hard drugs (or so the story goes) and he met kathleen brennan and among other things she introduced him to the music of captain beefheart and the rest is history. swordfishtrombones, rain dogs, franks wild years (i don't care what people say about franks wild years, it's also really good!).

everything he's done since the 90s has been pretty hit-or-miss. a lot of people like it. hell, a lot of people love it.

i'm more of a fan of old tom waits, myself!