Rewind: Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

I hate calling albums "life-changing." Maybe "taste-changing," or better yet, "taste-challenging" is a proper  description for those records that do alter your life in some way. Rain Dogs did that to me.

Rain Dogs is one-third of the trifecta that includes Swordfishtrombones and Frank's Wild Years, and is long-believed to be Tom Waits's strongest album. It's heavy on the experimental, but not so much that it would alienate more conservative music fans. Let's face it, Tom Waits is kind of a hard sell to those raised on top forty radio. I use the "mom" test. If my mom likes it, it can't be too off-putting. She loves it.

Admittedly, I haven't been much of a Tom Waits fan in recent years. His current output sounds a bit to much like self-parody, but I still regularly drag out Rain Dogs and remember a time when I thought it was the weirdest, wackiest record I could find that didn't bug my mom.