Is fast becoming my favorite album of the year. OMFG this is fucking awesome. Tom Waits is the man. Hoist That Rag is also probably the best song of the year.

i have issues with tom waits, but i agree about hoist that rag.

Where were you yesterday when I had this in my hand and put it down to get something else?

Gotta pick it up at some point.

me too. so i go around calling Tom Waits my favorite musician..yet I haven't listened to this album yet.

Agreed on "Hoist that Rag", but this album isn't as good as Blood Money or most of Alice. It doesn't even approach Mule Variations. It won't be in my top 20.

Still pretty good, though.

Album seems to get a bit messy at times for me. I do love Hoist That Rag but Make It Rain is probably my fave. This album could still make my top twenty.

Day after Tomorrow busts my balls every time I hear it.

best waits album since rain dogs....imo......

Best Waits album in years, I concur!

Best Tom Waits song of the year "Bukowski" by Modest Mouse?

Nice one, Bloor. LOL!

Only listened to bits of Real Gone so far. Promising, though. Mule Variations is my Waits entry point, though, so it's going to be tough for anything to beat that going forward.

Yea I thought the same thing too when I first heard the song. At least the fact that it is very Tom Waits-y. Not sure that it beats a few songs off of Real Gone, though.

I'm another who thinks Real Gone is the best Waits album since Rain Dogs.

WARNING: unpopular opinion ahead: I loved the anti-"Piano Man" detour he took with Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs. I thought both those albums put Waits in a position in which he could travel in any direction, incorporate any music genre/sound/noise he felt like, and still maintain his own voice. And even though I sorta like Bone Machine, that album is where he drove into a creative cul de sac, codifying the unlimited potential of those two earlier breakthroughs into preset molds of clanking tantrums and gruff cheesecorn. On Mule Variations he started to sound uncomfortably like a cruel whiteman parody of authentic blues, and by the desperate Alice and Blood Money that parody had looped back on itself and turned him into unintentional comedy. Real Gone, to my ears, finds Waits still not out of the cul de sac, but it at least suggests that he's looking for the on-ramp to the freeway. There's a lot of great songs - it's the first Waits album in a long while that I can play from beginning to end without jumping for the skip button - and "Baby Gonna Leave Me" has got the coolest groove since "16 Shells From A 30:06".