Soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car

Tom Waits fans are a peculiar breed. The Wolfman does not promote a cult of personality - Waits shys away instinctively from all self-promotion, is notoriously cagey in the presence of journalists and devotees, and seems at times to make his work deliberately inaccessible, as anyone who's listened to some of the vaudevillian nightmares of Mule Variations, The Black Rider, and Bastards will testify.

Waits is a relentless inventor and, musically, something of an auteur - he is famed for being obsessively precise in articulating his lyrics, arrangements, art-work, and so on. For a man who actively promotes "the unfinished article - warts and scars and all", he is minutely anal about getting "it" right; an off-key passage, the whine of a string breaking, the clonk of a chair-leg falling through the fissures in a floor-board, the imperfectly timed cough - all of these combine in Waits songs to create an atmosphere that is uniquely Waitsian.

Even the term 'Waitsian' carries weight in the annals of musical journalism; its definition is obviously imprecise, spanning as it does everything from Closing Time-era balladry (Showing Waits fascination with Tin Pan Alley classic songwriting, subtly influenced by the standard template of 20's and 30's blues musicians; Waits has stated many times that Hoagy Carmichael and Howlin' Wolf were as important to him as Kerouac and Dylan) to the sleazy noir of SwordFishTrombones, all the way to the bleached-bone scare stories of Bone Machine. But if Waits imprecision and elusiveness is his hallmark of choice, then it adds to his mystique - he has made a career out of being un-pindownable, impossible to nail the ragged, smoke-stained voice to the collecting board of genre.

'Waitsian' is generally taken to mean any sludgy, detuned varietal of music-hall villain, world-weary minstrel, and mad inventor in the basement, stapling steaks to washboards and shooting Zildjian cymbals at point-blank range with a twelve-bore, and while this is a key feature of a lot of Waits oeuvre (Sleazy down-and-out characters pissing their lives in glorious tragi-comedy up the wall, somewhere off Skid Row), his work is also populated with a cast of freakish figures that rebound disquietingly off real life - the high-school jock who ended up sleeping with transsexual prostitutes, the ghost truck driver, the long-distance lovelorn call from Istanbul. It’s the superimposition of the normal and pathetic upon the surreal and grotesque that makes it so compelling.

Anyway, here's a few highlights from the whole span of Waits's work. Enjoy!

http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2010/01/04/tom-waits-nighthawks-on-the-radio-1976-wnew-fm-nyc/

http://bigshouldersporter.blogspot.com/2007/11/fill-in-blank-playlist.html

http://www.sandiegoserenade.com/2006/06/springsteen_seals_n_shit.html

http://monkeybastardsv20.blogspot.com/2009/03/mannish-boy.html

Get that down your ear-pipes.