Refusing to go quietly into history

Tom Waits is getting older. We all do, but it is disheartening to think that most of Tom's wild years are behind him. Thirty years into his musical career, maybe the time has come for Waits to take it easy. Word has it that the world's premiere barstool beatnik has even given up drinking and smoking. His new album, "Mule Variations" retreads familiar ground without breaking any new soil, but if anyone deserves to tread creative waters, Tom Waits does.

For those of you unfamiliar with Tom Waits, as most of you surely are, he is the ragged-haired, raspy-voiced, hard drinker from movies like "Ironweed" and "Short Cuts."

Waits never sold a lot of albums because his raspy voice is an acquired taste, like single-malt scotch or cheap cigars. His voice was never that great to begin with, and by the mid-1970s it eroded into a creaky, chain-smoking hack. This voice was well suited for his songs, which ran the gamut between broken hearts and broke-down engines, see-ya-laters and carburetors.

Wait's lyrics about hard drinking and hard times constitute a kind of folk poetry. Many fans have argued over the years that Waits is one of America's finest poets. Waits always countered them by saying, "If I wanted to be a poet, I'd write poems. I write lyrics."

"Mule Variations" is Waits' first album since 1992's "Bone Machine." This isn't one of his best albums, which must make it one of his worst because Tom Waits has set such a standard of excellence for himself over the last 30 years. He has always thrived by delivering the unexpected, but "Mule Variations" is pretty much what you would expect.

Clocking in at over 70 minutes, this is a very long album, but none of the songs are very surprising. Every song on the album sounds like a rehash of older Waits songs. "Big in Japan" sounds like "Going out West" from 1992. Ballads like "House Where Nobody Lives" and "Picture in a Frame" sound like countless older Waits ballads like "On the Nickel."

"What's He Building?" is the strongest song on the album, even though it consists of a bunch of banging noises and drills with Waits telling a story over the top. Once again, however, this song is in the same tradition as older story songs like "Frank's Wild Years" and "Potter's Field."

This is the most blues-saturated of any of Waits' albums, but Waits has played the blues before. It's great to hear new music from the guy, but new is a relative term. Every Waits album has sounded different from the last. "Mule Variations" is a different way of delivering more of the same.

If you want to get into Tom Waits, "Mule Variations" isn't the best place to start. All of his jazz-soaked albums from the '70s are incredible, especially "Heart of Saturday Night," "Small Change" and "Blue Valentine." In the '80s Waits started experimenting with different styles of music, and "Rain Dogs" from 1986 is considered his best album by many critics, although many fans give "Frank's Wild Years" the upper hand.

It's great to hear that Waits has a healthy lifestyle after all his decadent years, but he'll always be a gin-soaked boy to his fans. Let's hope he doesn't wait another seven years to release his next album. The party may be over, but don't turn out the lights on Tom Waits just yet.