*Well, it's 9th and Hannepin/And all the donuts have/names that sound like prostitutes/And the moon's teethmarks are/on the sky like a tarp thrown over this...*

Will you follow once again, as Tom takes you down by the docks, down among the bars and wharves, among the tars and tattoos and whores, the baling hooks, the faded beauties and lost causes, conspiracies and demented dreams, the jetsam bits and pieces and bodies, the unidentified floating objects, the seedy flophouses, the carnival on the edge of town? Into his world of transients, washouts, thugs, freaks, bimboes, soiled sheets, one night stands that stand forever, whiskey and sentiment and bags bull of memories jolted into meaning as the head bangs the table...

For whatever reason, Waits' music has a real special way with people - it's like an illicit affair for a lot of them - far from the supermarket, the disco and the polite conversations of the modern world. It comes jabbering fragments and prismed visions from the dark end of the Street, hawing bad breath and liquor dreams all over the carpet. And in its multitative boozy sentimental/savage scenarios, they glimpse a kind of kaleidoscopic truth. *In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king* (Singapore).