Tom Waits

With his lazy drawl, barroom swagger, and unimpeachable sense of cool, Tom Waits is a one-man reincarnation of the bohemian beat poets — and one of the most compelling songwriters of the last 30 years. Hear his genius on these gritty gems: "Jersey Girl" is often mis-identified as a Bruce Springsteen track, but the Boss was only covering the composition first heard on 1980's Heartattack and Vine; and if you're looking for a triple shot of premium lowlife followed by a series of broke-down chasers, just plug into The Heart of Saturday Night (1974). Take a snifter of special reserve jazz-poetry, in our Tom Waits Next Steps.

Pursuing his own defiant course through a world with which he's frequently at odds, Tom Waits has steered his poetic eye towards a breed of music that defies description . . . and it remains utterly his own — 1975's jazzy Nighthawks at the Diner was recorded "live" in front of a small, invited audience (producer Bones Howe wheeled his gear into Record Plant Studios and set up a bar) and that sense of intimacy saturates a set of tracks inspired by the kind of lives and scenes painted by Edward Hopper: signature track "Better Off Without a Wife" taps straight into the album's spirit. Waits sings with the stage in mind, and takes folk deep into leftfield, in Deep Cuts.

Waits' music and persona are so surreal that it's sometimes hard to remember that he's a living artist, not some fabulous fictional creation. No matter how deeply you dig into his catalogue, there's gold to be mined. Mule Variations (1999) won a GRAMMY® for Best Contemporary Folk album, and features leftfield standouts like the fiercely corrosive "Big in Japan," while 2002's Blood Money — a collaboration with Kathleen Brennan and avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson — contains songs written for the play Woyzeck: cheer yourself up with "Misery is the River of the World."

His songs have inspired cover versions by artists including Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles. But any attempt to emulate Tom Waits' sly humour, blistering imagery, and off-the-wall melodic flair would be doomed to failure. These Essentials provide a nuanced overview of the man whose musical ambitions have bled onto the stage and the big screen, and whose stylistic range takes in old-school vaudeville at one end and out-there experimentalism at the other. Wend your way from 1973 debut album Closing Time ("Martha" would be separately covered by Tim Buckley and Meatloaf) to 2006's superb triple-set, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, which blends the old and the new in one potent Waits cocktail — cue up any song here, and within seconds you'll be high on the fumes of his genius.