Artist	Song
Tom Waits [Blood Money]	Another Man's Vine (2:29)
Tom Waits [Real Gone]	Metropolitan Glide (4:14)
Tom Waits [The Black Rider]	Crossroads (2:46)
Tom Waits [Bone Machine]	Whistle Down The Wind (4:36)
Tom Waits [Nighthawks At The Diner]	Big Joe and Phantom 309 [live] (6:24)
Tom Waits [Real Gone]	Green Grass (3:14)
Tom Waits [Asylum Years]	Kentucky Avenue (4:52)
Tom Waits [Alice]	Fawn (1:44)
Tom Waits [Bone Machine]	Who Are You (3:58)
Tom Waits [Swordfishtrombones]	Gin Soaked Boy (2:25)
Tom Waits [Asylum Years]	Burma Shave (6:34)
Tom Waits [Real Gone]	Hoist That Rag (4:21)
Tom Waits [Alice]	Lost In The Harbour (3:46)
Tom Waits [The Black Rider]	Flash Pan Hunter Intro (1:13)
Tom Waits [Bone Machine]	A Little Rain (2:59)
Tom Waits [Nighthawks At The Diner]	Better Off Without A Wife [live] (3:45)
Tom Waits [Asylum Years]	Martha (4:30)
Tom Waits [Big Time]	Train Song [live] (4:31)
Tom Waits [Real Gone]	Clang Boom Steam (0:47)
Tom Waits [Big Time]	Falling Down (4:16)
Tom Waits [Alice]	Fish And Bird (4:00)
Tom Waits [The Black Rider]	The Last Rose Of Summer (2:09)

Comment:

It sounds ridiculous, but Tom Waits is really, after all the layers have been stripped away, an American sage of compassion. This is my second TW mix out of 3 (so far...), no songs in common with Beautiful Maladies, and it's the slowest (most languorous?) and most thematically consistent. i could listen to the others over and over without limit, i'd bet; this one is the one that, hopefully enough, makes the statement. The waves of catharsis proceeding from Waits are unbelievable, then; he'll take you down just so you can rebound back up again. Sing along with Tom to the very pit of despair; but he's no irresponsible guide to the Inferno: miraculously, Tom winds up being the benevolent puppetmaster, showing you the sights in all serious twistedness yet never succumbing far enough that he won't let you, or himself, out again. So you'll return to the surface healed, and far stronger yet again for looking death in the eye. When I return from the bowels of the Metropolitan Region, it's this mix's elixir that saves me; abangaku's guarantee! Title comes from a line in "Hoist That Rag", probably the best song on Waits's latest offering, Real Gone; Tom anagrams and just plain fucks-up the anti-war formula so far it's practically unrecognizable. From any other artist, "All Is Fair In Love And War" is a hackneyed line; from Tom, it's a statement of faith, the key that unlocks the Waitsian journey, something necessary to believe. All being fair and all, we're led to a level plain, onto which Tom gives us an ordering worthy of Serialism. The veils are lifted: Love is a war, or its equivalent, plain and simple; and yet both are strangely beyond-obsessive for all their trials.

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