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

As you can probably guess, “The Black Rider” is a personification of death. Waits performs the title track in a faux-German accent, which is something he’ll return to later. He creates a bleak landscape in “November” (“It only believes / in a pile of dead leaves / and a moon / that’s the color of bone”), and brings us a fairy tale love song in “The Briar and the Rose”. Many of the songs consist of repetitions of a single phrase or two, which makes me think they were used as interstitials in performances of the play. Really, this must be one weird-ass play. There are a couple of great spoken word pieces, including the introductions in which Waits plays a carnival barker, and “Crossroads”, where he explains how magic bullets work. I would pay good money to see this play.