[Revolting cat!]

A lot of people don’t get Tom Waits, just like a lot of people don’t get Bob Dylan, and complain that he can’t sing, revealing more about themselves than about him. Others don’t get opera, or don’t get James Joyce. On the other hand, there is nothing to get in Debbie Boone’s singing or Sheryl Crow’s for that matter. But a stylist like Dylan and Waits, or, heck, Ray Charles, has to be ‘gotten’.

[firebrand]

Good comment. As a matter of fact, it’s meaningless to compare singers. If they’re any good, their music comes from a unique place.

[Michael.SF.]

Dylan and Waits, or, heck, Ray Charles, has to be ‘gotten’

Unique group you have there.

Maybe I do not "get" Ray Charles -- but to me he was simply an awesome talent who loved music, simple and enjoyable and with few complexities. There are many like him (Solomon Burke, Bobby Blue Bland, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis) Ray stood above the others though in part because he had the ability to cross over into many genres that some of the others named did not share, at least to the same extent.

But Dylan and Waits are two that are unique. Their songs are often wonderfully performed by others:

Dylan - Watchtower, It's All over Now, Baby Blue, Wanted Man, Forever Young

Waits - Downtown Train, 'Ol 55, Keep the Devil Down in the Hole.

To me no one can do a Ray Charles song like Ray can, no one.

Yet for Dylan and Waits there are songs that no one else can do them as well as the original (Cold, Cold Ground, Tangled Up in Blue)

[Ignatz]

I agree. Tom Waits isn't mainstream (however, straight-ahead rock-n-roller Bob Seger covered "New Coat of Paint" on his albumn, The Fire Inside), but he can put more pathos in a single phrase written on a Post-it note than Sheryl Crow's complete output to date written on a whole roll of bathroom tissue!

"I'm Still Here" is an incredible song, that clocks in at under two minutes, and will have grown men weeping by the end of it!