Tom Waits’ Mule Variations turns 25 this year. Waits marked the occasion with a previously unreleased version of “Get Behind the Mule”, followed by “Mule Conversations”, a 40-minute video of songs and interviews about the album. Meanwhile, his label (ANTI-) announced a limited edition re-issue on silver vinyl. As with all of his work, the album is achingly sincere without being pat, referential without being derivative, and highly self-aware without falling back on the postmodern crutch of irony.
For most of my life, I liked the idea of Tom Waits more than the music of Tom Waits. It was only as an American ex-pat, in the remote throes of yet another deeply dispiriting election season, that I recognized the appeal that finally brought me into the Waits universe: not his dark eccentrics or rambling outsiders, but his earnest search for a home.
I became a true fan around 2022, shortly after settling into the quaint Dutch town of Leiden. After years of passive respect, the music suddenly resonated in a new way, spurring me to dig deeper into the albums and to seek out ephemera and like-minded outsiders. The setting of my belated appreciation was a bit odd, even dissonant. The city of Leiden, a short train ride south of Amsterdam, is quintessentially, stereotypically Dutch: soft lights, quiet canals, cobblestone streets, and wisteria climbing historic facades. A town of Spinoza and Rembrandt, Leiden boasts a strong sense of heritage and place, a strong sense of its roots. In short, the city contrasts sharply with the dark, liminal geographies explored in Waits’ music.
If YouTube comments are believed, conversion experiences are fairly common with Tom Waits fans. Hearing a particular song, perhaps for the umpteenth time, at a particularly vulnerable moment can transform a passing appreciator into an adoring fan. When the light hits the music just right, Waits’ body of work unlocks and reveals itself. The album that first clicked for me was Mule Variations, an Americana record fully digested through Waits’ meat grinder imagination. It won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 1999 and has a rootedness largely absent in his earlier records. It’s perhaps not surprising that this record absorbed me so thoroughly when I fell down the rabbit hole, at precisely the moment when questions of “home” and “roots” became so acute.
Tom Waits’ work—especially the corpus he has produced since his pivotal 1983 album Swordfishtrombones—is notoriously difficult, even when there’s an undeniable pop sensibility undergirding many of the songs. It’s the found sounds, the abrasive instrumentation, the disregard for generic conventions, and, yes, the growling bark of a voice. Despite his many accolades and critical acclaim, Waits remains—or seems to remain—a consummate outsider.
Beginning with 1973’s Closing Time, his early years were marked by a roughshod, ersatz beatnik-at-the-bar character. He sang of cars and the road, nightclubs and neon cities, down-and-out and hard-up in the American twilight. He was, or pretended to be, a drifter, a man ever on the move and ever on the fringes. The influence of Kerouac and Bukowski is difficult to miss.
By the mid-1980s, guided by a suite of new musical influences, the lyrical vagabonding became more surreal, but the theme of rootlessness endured. The barfly night owls gave way to characters farther afield in time and place: sailors and soldiers, tramps and circus freaks. Tom Waits (and Kathleen Brennan, his wife and longtime collaborator) loves transients and vagrants—runners of all stripes.
Through aimless Googling, I discovered the Tom Waits Library, an impressive digital repository of everything related to the man and his music. Though it had been five years since the site’s last update, I was greeted by an overwhelming trove of interviews, photos, timelines, and trivia. A curiosity gripped me: who were these quirky fans maintaining a fan site for so many years, and why had they suddenly stopped? From my apartment on Pieterskerkgracht—so named for the serene 15th-century church at the end of the lane (Pieterskerk, “Peter’s Church”)—I clicked the “About” tab. To my astonishment, not only did I find Dutch registration documents, but the listed address was on Pieterskerkhof, beside the church itself, a mere 300 meters from where I sat Googling.
It was an eerie, almost mystical, coincidence. Over the next week, a mild obsession took hold, and I felt myself almost transforming into a Tom Waits character. A search for hidden threads linked me to the busybody neighbor who narrates the paranoid spoken word song “What’s He Building?” (also on Mule Variations). I walked the block to see if I could find any evidence of the Tom Waits Library. The library lives online, so I’m unsure what material traces I expected. A concert poster? A porkpie hat on the windowsill? A dented sousaphone with a Venus flytrap growing from its horn? The address was on my regular circuits through town. I passed it to take out the recycling, go to the gym, and buy bread at the bakery. When I reached the historic ring of buildings around Pieterskerk, I found an unassuming architecture agency instead.
There must have been a mix-up. I sent a message to the generic email address on the archive’s website, but nobody responded. A week or two passed, and the silence deepened the mystery. I passed by the building every so often, hoping in vain for some clue. I felt misdirected and misled, as if something ill-defined and sinister was afoot behind the apparent banality of the fansite. After some time, I returned to the Dutch registration documents and noticed a last name I hadn’t seen before that matched a name on the architecture bureau sign. This time, Google returned a phone number. I made the call on December 7—by coincidence, it was Tom Waits’ birthday.
A man answered the phone, speaking in rapid Dutch that I couldn’t understand. It had been nearly a month since this started, so I was nervous, hyper-aware that I may be calling a random stranger to ask about an archive he’s never heard of, devoted to a cult musician he may not know. After interlinguistic confusion and miscommunication about addresses and intent, the man’s tone softened. Yes, we are neighbors, and this was the Tom Waits Library. He was not the original administrator of the site. He inherited that responsibility from his friend, who founded it in 1999, the same year that Mule Variations was released. We made vague plans to meet for a beer and chat about Tom Waits, and the mystery—or, really, the mystery that wasn’t—ended there.
Unsurprisingly, what had seemed a tantalizing mystery or mystical coincidence turned out to be pretty pedestrian. Somewhat deflated, a new question replaced the old: Why had I, at this moment, become so absorbed in the apparent strangeness? What appealed to me about Tom Waits and his devoted Dutch fan community, such that I imagined shadows of intrigue where none existed?
After college, I left my home state of Indiana, and what followed were years of semi-structured globetrotting: Chicago to Kathmandu, Hong Kong to Berlin, and Phoenix to London. The footloose teenager in me—who, like Tom Waits, was taken as a young man with the romantic mythologies of the Beat Generation—would have been pleased. Yet the parade of life in foreign apartments finally ended in Leiden. For the first time since leaving the American Midwest, it was not another waystation but a new home. Unfortunately, foreign roots are hard to plant, and in hindsight, that’s what attracted me to the Tom Waits Library: the possibility of a new community.
There’s a critical tendency to see a hopeless naïvete in cultural representations of the road. A general cynicism attaches to literature and songs seen to indulge in immature highway escapism. The childishness becomes even more pathetic as the fans grow into middle age. However, such texts were never dumbly nostalgic, or at least, they were never only that. Running through them all–from Jack Kerouac to Bruce Springsteen–is a bone-deep melancholy that tempers the idealism. In Tom Waits’ music, this melancholy is impossible to ignore. His stories are brimming with roads and wanderers but they are rarely romanticized. The overriding mythology may be one of movement, but Waits clarifies the emptiness of flight and the perilous lack of relations required by escape.
For all its demented exuberance, Waits’ music foregrounds that grief of severed ties. His lyrics are filled with rambling outcasts, but many explicitly long for a home. The title Rain Dogs (1985), perhaps Waits’ finest album, attests to this directly. The term refers to dogs who wander outside during a storm, only to have the rain wash away the scents that could have led them home. In other words, rain dogs are objects of pity, not glory.
Other songs—like “Day After Tomorrow” or “Tell It To Me”—offer mournful narrators on their way home who hope to get there really soon, even if we listeners can’t quite believe them. Then you have tracks like his cover of Kerouac’s “Home I’ll Never Be”, where the narrator knows their rootless fate and accepts it with sad resignation.
According to the Tom Waits Library’s unscientific glossary, “home” (and related variants) is his oeuvre’s ninth most common thematic term. With occurrences in (at least) 87 songs, it beats out a suite of other terms that one might sooner suspect, such as “road”, “world”, “heart”, and “death”. Once you recognize the motif, you’ll notice its recurrence across his catalogue.
Perhaps no song better exemplifies the tension between mobility and permanence than “Anywhere I Lay My Head”. At first listen, it’s easy to hear the refrain—“Anywhere I lay my head, I’m gonna call my home”—as a kind of cosmopolitan exultation. Yet, the song is a dirge in both tenor and lyrical content. The narrator has already “set the Thames on fire” and now “must come back down”. The song’s impact stems from the interplay of hope and regret, the clear-eyed realization that relinquishing one’s sense of belonging requires that one “learned to be alone”. Even if his narrator may not, Tom Waits knows that to be at home anywhere is to be at home nowhere at all.
Earlier this year, my wife and I bought a house, the most permanent place I’ve had since leaving Indiana. Our young son will grow up in Holland and know Leiden as home. There’s a strange reversal of the American story in all of this: another fun fact about Pieterskerk, the historic church casting shadows on the Tom Waits Library, is that it offered a pivotal stopover for the Pilgrims. After leaving England, the community spent years in Leiden, praying in Pieterskerk, before securing funds for the Mayflower and setting sail for a new home in the New World.
Perhaps no history has been so thoroughly whitewashed as that of the Pilgrims, but when it comes to Tom Waits, mythology (not reality) is the coin of the realm. The appeal of the Pilgrims’ journey is a faith in greener pastures, a search for a home that necessitates not returns but departures. It’s a rose-tinted revisionism, to be sure, but it begins a throughline across the seas and back again to the Tom Waits Library, housed in an architect’s office on Pieterskerkhof.
My favorite Tom Waits song concludes the album that first clicked for me: “Come On Up to the House” from Mule Variations. The song is a shaggy gospel hymn, as only Waits can deliver. The lyrics promise deliverance and not-quite-heavenly redemption: “The seas are stormy / you can’t find no port / come on up to the house”. This feeling remains after the boats wash ashore at Plymouth and the hot rods of rock n’ roll have rusted away. It was the sentiment that finally resonated and inaugurated me into
proper Waits fandom: the ambivalent desire for a hearth amidst a wandering life.