If you're mad enough to be among those still trying to figure out what makes Thomas Alan Waits tick, you could do worse than to just reflect on the tools of his trade. There's the piano, of course, at the heart of his first recordings in the early '70s, and still his most effective ally. And then there are the kitsch strings, brass and woodwinds that gave the huckster jazz poet the musical-theater air he's been deliriously contaminating and ventilating through the four decades of his... More >>>