If Waits's music makes a virtue of clutter, his lyrics have an almost classical tidiness. (He's one of the few rock songwriters whose words read well on the printed page.) On Real Gone, the songs are bleak and blood-soaked; Waits may be reacting to world events--the album includes at least one explicit antiwar number, "Day After Tomorrow"--but as always, his songs seem to float outside time, pieced together from old books, old movies and other scraps of cultural memory. In recent years Waits has gone rustic, leaving behind the diners and dive bars of his early albums to lay his songs in stark rural settings. Most of the songs on Real Gone take place in a kind of Gothic Upper Midwest, a landscape of cornfields, slate-gray skies and violence. In "How's It Gonna End" Waits sings:

The barn leaned over
The vultures dried their wings
The moon climbed up an empty sky
The sun sank down behind the tree on the hill
There's a killer and he's coming
Thru the rye

Not just anyone could get away with lines like these. Waits's voice, which even at its most dulcet sounds like a revving lawn-mower engine, is his secret weapon: It allows him to sing things that would sound corny coming from anyone else. And yet, while his art depends utterly on his singing, it's his singing--the shamelessly overwrought manner in which he tries on the voices of hobos, old salts, carnival barkers, madmen--that gives a listener pause. Several years ago, a friend walked out midway through a screening of Waits's 1988 concert film, Big Time. He'd been repelled by Waits's bug-eyed stage antics and by a voice that seemed to grow more cartoonish with every song. "It seemed almost like minstrelsy," my friend said.

He wasn't wrong. Waits is filed in the rock bin at your local record store, but his soul belongs to the musical theater--not the tradition of Sondheim or even Brecht and Weill but that of Joe Weber and Lew Fields: the primitive and unruly turn-of-the-century vaudeville stage, with its ethnic dialect singers, blackface comedians and sentimental balladeers bellowing Tin Pan Alley tunes to the cheap seats. Today, we are uncomfortable with this colorful, complicated, vulgar part of our musical heritage, but it remains one of the seedbeds of American song, and Waits draws on it avidly, embracing vaudeville-style coarseness and artifice in a musical age obsessed with authenticity. Listen to virtually any rock singer, and you'll hear variations on a single persona: sensitive rocker, sexy rocker, gruff rocker. On Real Gone, Waits roars like a pirate in one song and slurs his words like a drunk in the next; he sings in the voices of a 21-year-old soldier, a circus performer, a cuckold, an escaped convict and a dead man. It's postmodern minstrelsy of a very high order.

But the roots of Waits's music stretch deeper into the past. His wife, co-producer and frequent collaborator, Kathleen Brennan, has described her husband's two songwriting modes as "Grim Reapers and grand weepers," themes that link Waits's work not only to that perennial rock-and-roll wellspring, the blues, but to some of the earliest American pop songs: to death-haunted Victorian ballads, with their tragic loves and waltz-time melodies, and further back, to nostalgia-soaked antebellum parlor songs. We can hear echoes of those ancient songs on Real Gone: in the spooky "Green Grass," sung by a ghost to the lover at his graveside ("There's a bubble of me/And it's floating in thee"); in "Sins of my Father," with its pastoral scenes and dream of "Jenny with the light brown hair." Forget punk revivalists, with their haircuts and snarling three-chord songs straight out of 1977; forget Lenny Kravitz, with his flared pants and vintage tube amplifiers. Tom Waits is keeping Stephen Foster's nineteenth century alive in twenty-first-century pop. Now that's a retro-rocker.

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