1978’s Blue Valentine is Tom Waits’ most straight-faced and romantic album, and also one of his most frequently overlooked. Admittedly, opening the album with a schmaltzy cover of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s “Somewhere” (yep, the one from West Side Story) probably wasn’t a great idea, and several songs find Waits still mired in tired, idiomatic 12 bar blues arrangements, but these stumbles are forgiven in context of some of the unimpeachable numbers here. Preeminent among these is the heartbreaking, epistolary “Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis”: over the course of four and a half minutes, the correspondent, presumably a former lover, brags of a new, clean life in the straight world, but can’t sustain the lie long enough to even complete the postcard ; by the end, she’s requesting money to pay off her lawyer and volunteering her date of parole. It’s masterful storytelling, as vivid and creditable as any scene concocted by Raymond Carver, and it is performed brilliantly. Elsewhere, “Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard” is a rare look at Tom Waits the Rock ‘n’ Roller, sounding like a cross between Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Alice Cooper, while the tender and picaresque “Kentucky Avenue” reveals the likely influence of pal Bruce Springsteen’s 1973 album The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle.