Mule Variations, Tom Waits’ debut album for Epitaph records, would set the course Waits would follow for the next decade, and earned him a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album as well as his highest position to date on the Billboard chart. While it is perhaps difficult to imagine pierced punks embracing the debauched early records of the Waits’ Asylum years, a recent turn toward hangdog Americana and bile-spitting blues would put him in the company of prestige artists like Johnny Cash, another recently exhumed icon who ostensibly provided a template on how to grow old and stay weird. Mule Variations is over 70 minutes long and feels even longer, yet remains one of Waits’ most celebrated works. The album’s overarching sound is one of scintillating tones and mausoleum-funky textures: instruments often sound like battery-operated machines leaking ooze ; guitarists perform like abandoned Arctic expeditionists whose teeth-chattering and bone-shivering alone provide the tremolo. New to Waits’ arsenal of sounds is beatboxing and DJ scratching, the former a series of itinerant scats and snarls, the latter a suggestion of what modern hip-hop might sound like had scratching been invented not by Kool Herc, but by William Burroughs. “Lowside Of the Road” and “Black Market Baby” sound like Cajun blues LPs pressed off-center; “Hold On” is Waits’ most elegant pop song since “Downtown Train”; “House Where Nobody Lives,” “Picture In A Frame,” and the processional-sounding “Come On Up The House” prove that Waits can still write songwriting circles around his various imitators; and “Cold Water” is the most irresistible Tom Waits singalong since “Cemetery Polka.” Then there’s the filler: “Filipino Box Spring Hog” is so outrageously plagiaristic of Captain Beefheart that its practically scandalous, while the unintentionally comical spoken-word of “What’s He Building Down There” is about as spooky as a Styrofoam tombstone on Halloween. Other songs seem to run out of ideas long before they actually end (does “Get Behind the Mule” really need to be nearly seven minutes long?). In Barney Hoskyns’ 2008 biography Lowside Of The Road: A Life Of Tom Waits, former producer Bones Howe argues that the length of Mule Variations does it a disservice: “The problem with (Waits) and Kathleen (Brennan) producing their own records,” he says, “is they can’t step back to look at their work.” One might just suggest a smaller canvas.