THROWBACK 1999 || Tom Waits: "Hold On"

Alright, July being a month filled with vapid summertime releases that I have no interest in covering here - to wit, new LPs by 311, Incubus, 3 Doors Down and Sublime - it seems as good a time as any to kick off the Throwback series. Since the aforementioned new releases might already lead one to believe we're still living at the turn of the millennium, let's go with something from 1999.

1999 was kind of a transitional year. Nearly all the commercially successful grunge and alt rock bands that ruled the decade had either imploded - Soundgarden, Faith No More, Gin Blossoms, White Zombie - or had taken a nose dive in album sales... Stone Temple Pilots, Collective Soul, Bush, Third Eye Blind, etc.

On the other hand, 1999 was the Year of Napster; many youth who would ordinarily have been fussing over the Next Big Thing were instead fleshing out their existing discographies, downloading old stuff that they'd never got around to buying and just generally catching up on the classics. Yep, it was the era of compilations and greatest hits records, the remix collection and the covers album... a period in flux that the record business never really recovered from.

But while most artists were churning out filler anthologies and wondering where their audience went, Thomas Alan Waits was just getting his second wind.  Mule Variations was the first proper Tom Waits solo album since 1992's Bone Machine, a seven year gap unprecedented in the main's 25 year recording history to that point.

Waits chose this minor "comeback" as an opportunity to reinvest in his past, exploring damn near every sound he'd tinkered with over the previous quarter of a century.  "Hold On" is probably the most anachronistic of the new material, a stifled, stripped bare ballad that, with the substitution of piano for guitar, would have fit right in during his drunken lounge lizard phase in the 70s.