2020GQ mix: Tom Waits- The Earth Died Screaming

Nobody sounds like Tom Waits, obviously. But he’s also a fantastic songwriter. His earliest works are perfect, often heartbreaking vignettes in what was then, in his youth,  a kind of weathered, pinched-throat singing style. But it was definitely singing. Some of my most intense emotional memories are inextricably tied to Waits songs. That voice  would transform over time into the wounded-animal/construction-equipment yowl it became here. It is the sound of the current version of apocalypse to me. Honorable mention is the dirge Dirt in the Ground- no explanation needed, I think.