Waits a minute there, U2

Sometimes Tom Waits is not my thing. For instance, I like bacon as much as the next person, but the song "Filipino Box Spring Hog" is a touch too carnivorous a song for me; what's more, it devolves into near-chanting at times, and I have precious little patience for chanting. I'm also rather wary of songs like "What's He Building in There," which might be performance art, but don't strike me as songs. "What's He Building in There," in fact, strikes me as the phenomenon that would result were Joe McCarthy to commission Dr. Seuss to write a poem and Christopher Walken to read it. Then there's a number of songs on Mule Variations that I could take or leave: they enact the vintage Tom Waits oddity but to relatively little purpose, I think (see "Eyeball Kid" and "Big in Japan"). Other songs I trust more to have some purpose, though I couldn't tell what it is. Still: can the line "stir my brandy with a nail" be for naught? could "Cold Water" make me think so readily of Bruce for nothing? Then there's another category of songs; I love them. Some I love only a little, like "Take it with Me" and "Pony," because they have only a small share of husky sweetness, of the element that's rough and wistful at the same time. Others I love immensely. "Georgia Lee," for example, strikes me, with its "Why wasn't God watching?" as a the put-upon utterance of a faith unable to put have done with theodicy and unable to have done with God. In another key, "Come on up to the House" keeps company with spirituals, and "Hold On" is the best sort of ballad: one without poetic distance so that the refrain to this song (the rejoinder to "hold on") exceeds the portrait of the characters who appear in its verses.

In comparison, U2 comes across as more solid and more staid. I don't find any song on Joshua Tree particularly irksome, and to sidle my sympathies back into keeping with "Running to Stand Still" or "Mothers of the Disappeared" is easy enough. So many of these songs, though, relistened-to, seem formulaic. I'm pretty sure that this judgment is unfair; I'm pretty sure that U2 patented the formula and that Joshua Tree sounds rather cookie-cutter in retrospect because so many other bands tried to reproduce it. But you can't blame the over-reliance on weather metaphors on anyone but U2 (so much rain).

So, yes: Mule Variations has tracks that I would probably skip and Joshua Tree doesn't. Nonetheless, Mule Variations surprises me in ways that, even when I don't particularly like them, I suspect of being worthwhile, and I can't say that about this U2 album. And when Tom Waits does snare me, when he blesses my "crooked little heart," it astounds me. Beyond the telling of it.

So: Mule Variations, mosey on.