Tom Waits Week: Things Get Weird (1983-1993)

The Black Rider (1993) – OK, so Tom Waits wrote songs for a play that William S. Burroughs wrote, based on a German folktale. Waits then recorded these songs for this album. Much of the album was written and recorded before Bone Machine, and it does sound like he’s experimenting with some of what he’d try there. The weird thing is that this album tells such a complete story that it’s hard to imagine what happened in the rest of the play.