Mule Variations by Tom Waits.

Format: CD and vinyl

Acquired: CD bought in unknown Geneva record shop. Vinyl gifted by brother.

Official release: April 16, 1999.

Recorded: Prairie Sun Recording Studios, California.

Back in 2005 Friday night at The Nottingham House in Broomhill meant open mic night. An evening where nobodies like us could howl over the low hum of half-finished conversations and pool balls being sunk.

I’d never heard a Tom Waits song in my life, much to the despair of my Canadian friend and colleague, Darryl. He then climbed onto the little stage, grabbed his resonator and started finger-picking Chocolate Jesus, and something beneath my feet shifted.

Darryl didn’t leave it there. As we crossed riffs and shifts together at the pub we worked in, he kept feeding me deeper cuts and stranger corners of the Waits back catalogue, sometimes jamming songs together after hours while Coen Brothers films flickered across the pub projector.

I was still at Tom Waits entry level — not a bad place to be — when I was poking through the CD racks in a Geneva record shop in 2006 and came across Mule Variations.

Chocolate Jesus and Come On Up To The House were familiar, but aside from that, this was a whole new adventure.

Maybe Mule Variations wasn’t the ideal entry point. Then again, maybe it was perfect. Waits spends the record wandering through old ghosts — Bone Machine, Closing Time, Small Change, Swordfishtrombones — like a man rattling around his own scrapyard, offering a different perspective on the sound of decades gone by.

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But Mule Variations is so wildly split in personality it could soundtrack a doomed arthouse romance and the next Saw trailer without blinking. My partner usually leaves the room when this record comes on. But in the following days my Spotify Friends sidebar tells me Hold On is playing from her account.

Half made up of junkyard folk rock that isn’t for the faint of heart with a second side that breaks your heart in two, while featuring Waits’ trademark post-70s percussion and postmodern Batman husk, it’s a record that stays with you one way or another.

Opening track Big In Japan sent shockwaves down my spine back in 2006, with Waits throwing percussive curveballs all over the place.

He later told Jody Denberg for Mule Conversations: “I was in a contest with myself in a hotel room. I wanted to see if I could sound like a band all by myself but without any instruments. So I just started banging on the chest of drawers and the wall, the headboard. Just trying to get that sound. The full band sound. And that’s what I wound up with. I hung onto it and looped it and sampled it.”

Fuzzed out guitars and the famous Waits croak join the rhythm de chambre to begin more or less where Bone Machine left off in 1992. But it’s Hold On that delivers the heaviest punch from the first three tracks.

A seminal moment not only for this album, but for his career. So gorgeous is the soundscape to this song, it feels like a blanket being thrown over you when the opening chords ring through. Waits’ vocal goes full 180, from downright creepy in Lowside Of The Road, to reassuring grandfather figure.

It’s in these moments when we see the softer side of the crooner that brings Mule Variations alive. Co-produced with long time collaborator, and wife, Kathleen Brennan, you can feel their bond through songs like Take It With Me: “Always for you, and forever yours. It felt like the old days, we fell asleep on Beaula’s porch. I’m gonna take it with me when I go.”

House Where Nobody Lives, Picture In A Frame and Georgia Lee sit in the same tender, late-night territory, but it’s Pony where Waits feels most introspective, even autobiographical, later telling Jody Denberg the inspiration behind one particular lyric:

“Evelyn’s kitchen, that’s my Aunt Evelyn, who passed away during the making of the record. Her and my uncle had ten kids. I guess when I’d been far away from home I’d think about her kitchen a lot, and a lot of people feel the same way when they’ve been far away from home. I dreamed about getting home to her kitchen so that’s why we put her in there, as a tribute to Evelyn.”

The darker heart of the album has that Waits percussive groove, with Get Behind The Mule, Cold Water and Filipino Box Spring Hog, unleashing his Hyde-side into the mix — Waits has angels on one shoulder and devils on the other.

And then there’s What’s He Building?, a piece of spoken-word paranoia so bizarre it could probably give children nightmares. But beneath the creeping dread and twitching curtains lies Waits’ dry humour at its best: observant, brutal and weirdly funny. And the more time you spend with it the funnier and more unsettling it becomes.

Mule Variations feels like a journey through every corner of Waits’ world — junkyards, kitchens, motel rooms, bad dreams and home sickness — delivered by an artist so strange and singular he still feels unmatched decades later. By the time Come On Up To The House finally rings out, I feel like I’ve survived some beautiful, strange night out.

And whenever Chocolate Jesus plays, I’m right back in The Notty again, watching Darryl do his growliest growl.

It’s been a while. Hope you’re reyt. Today I’m continuing the theme of all-time faves, but this time through a different lens.

We all have records that transport us to a place in time. Some do it so vividly you can smell the air, feel the damp or see the wallpaper.

Others arrive more like flickers — a feeling, a ghost of something long gone. You don’t plan for a song to become part of your life’s story. It just slips in. And when it reappears, it always takes you somewhere else.

For me, no record does that with the same clarity as Beautiful Freak by Eels.

Released in 1996, it was the first album Mark Oliver Everett — better known as E — put out under the Eels name. Coming off two solo records, it was a new beginning for E as he perfected his darkened power pop.

A record born in LA (Sunset Sound Factory) in the same kind of hallowed rooms that played host to Prince, The Doors and the ghosts of a hundred guitar solos but yet, to me, the record’s sound belongs to bogs, bracken, long walks in the rain, and the road trips that got us there.

Beautiful Freak ended up defining a patch of North Wales with more sheep than streetlights, more rain than phone signal, and more slate than rock n roll bands.

The question here really is, how did something made oceans away come to soundtrack our half-term escapes and muddy pilgrimages and why did it define the landscape so vividly?

To go back to the start, E was stacking the studio with the right names. Jon Brion (Elliot Smith, Kanye West, Frank Ocean) co-produced, bringing in his offbeat melodies and knack for making the strange feel intimate. Michael Simpson (Beck, Beastie Boys) brought in the dirt and dust — his fingerprints feel like they’re all over the record’s stranger arrangements.

At a time when grunge’s ashes were still warm and Britpop was swaggering through the UK, Beautiful Freak arrived like an uninvited guest — lofi melancholy that was quietly brilliant.

It gave us brittle beats, toy piano melodies, fuzzed-out guitars, and lyrics that drifted somewhere between defeated and divine. All delivered in E’s signature rasp — like he’s broadcasting from the bottom of a well on a broken radio. Or a sad clown humming Beach Boys tunes through a hangover.

My dad got a burned copy* from a mate at work. One of those old-school pirates — clear case, handwritten title, no sleeve. Me and Dad were connecting over music at this point by going to gigs together and comparing records.

But this one wasn’t just for the two of us, it ended up pulling the whole family in.

We were off on the usual family trip to the smudged, inky edges of Snowdonia — more precisely, the Mawddach estuary.

Even more precisely, ‘The Waleish House’ on Mawddach Crescent. A strange Victorian terrace overlooking the estuary, misnamed by my sister when trying to say ‘The Welsh House’, and the name stuck.

Originally meant to be an upscale resort, the dream never got beyond Mawddach Crescent. The surrounding land was all marsh and sand. Some houses became holiday lets. Others stayed lived-in. I remember one local clearly: a man the adults nicknamed Captain Birdseye. Whether it was the beard, the stare, or a fondness for fish-fingers, I never found out.

That trip, like so many, meant muddy trails, sideways rain, but it also meant Beautiful Freak spinning endlessly in the six-disc changer, always setting the mood.

It belonged to the land in ways I can’t fully explain, especially in the territory Mawddach Crescent fell within, Arthog. There was literally nothing there, not even a post office.

Close your eyes and think textbook Wales. That’s Arthog. Just sheep-speckled horizons, marshland, and big old hills. A world away from sunshine and studios, but somehow that slow burning sadness and quiet defiance fit perfectly. Especially the opener, Novocaine for the Soul.

In a now-archived interview titled PainstakingEel, from what must be assumed took place in 1996 or the surrounding years, E said: “Novocaine for the Soul sounds detached because it’s about detachment. That’s what I think is so great about that song, and on that level I think it’s almost genius. It’s detachment personified. I’m singing about numbness and I’m numb. It’s about having too much feeling.”

Looking back, those holidays were about detachment too. For our parents, it meant getting out of the city and the usual routines. Hitting reset. You don’t see that as a kid.

So, when we were trudging up Cregannan’s frog-like peak or edging our way around the Precipice Walk, maybe that was our parents walking in E’s shoes.

Maybe we all were.

Even in our detachment, the record was there, those plinky-plonky keys like a broken music box on the edge of sleep. And then — boom. That chorus.

Big. Lush. Full. The perfect complement to the stunning landscape.

One of my favourites back then was Rags to Rags. That creeping guitar and croaky vocal in between the tattered chorus: "Rags to rags and rust to rust. How do you stand when you've been crushed? So Rags to riches was a bust?"

It felt like shouting into the wind with no hope of being heard — but shouting anyway. If anywhere fits that description, it’s Fairbourne.

A town being swallowed by the sea, back then it had a Spar, a chippy, a curry house, a laundrette and a long beach lined with WWII tank traps. Not much to keep you there — and maybe that’s what made it so magnetic. Like the song, it was beautiful, broken, and fading fast.

And slowly, the whole record stopped being just music. It became geography. A photo album.

Each track mapped to a moment; Flower belonged to the hills: “It’s a pretty big world, God, and I am awful small...”

That hits different when you’re 14, halfway up a next-level incline in the pouring rain on a mountain bike (Novacaine For The Fucking Legs). Or when your hands are frozen around a fishing rod that hasn’t caught anything in hours.

Beautiful Freak — the title track — belonged to Barmouth Bridge. Or, as we called it, The Big Bridge. A railway and footbridge stretching across the estuary. It still takes tolls, but no longer takes trains, a sorry reflection of modern Britain.

It’s the one thing that doesn’t quite fit, and yet somehow defines the landscape.

The record’s outsider anthem paired perfectly with this unlikely landmark. Out of place, quietly iconic and secretly adored.

You can’t really explain Susan’s House. It’s too odd. Too brilliant. Too much its own thing. And yet, it goes down well with just about anyone.

And if you ever find yourself passing through Barmouth — that end-of-the-line, chips-and-charm seaside town — do yourself a favour and hit the coast road, wind down the window (in the rare event of no rain) and let it play. It makes sense there.

This is probably the track where Simpson’s influence shines through most. With its sampled piano lifted from Gladys Knight & the Pips’ Love Finds Its Own Way, the song taps into the same techniques that 90s hip-hop artists were using, but E did it differently.

And maybe it wasn’t just the place. Maybe it was E himself — that quiet, uninvited presence. Like he’d climbed into the back seat somewhere near Dolgellau and stayed silent the whole trip.

It’s a collection of songs that feels like one long sigh — stitched together with fuzz, ache, and quiet genius. There isn’t any filler or skips along this record, it’s immersive and swallows you whole.

Take the brilliance of Your Lucky Day In Hell — as menacing as a dark Welsh cloud when you’re only halfway back to the car, and too far gone to outrun it. It creeps in slow, brooding and inevitable. By the time the chorus hits, you're drenched — and secretly loving it.

Not Ready Yet, Guest List, Mental — all full of sharp turns, strange hooks, and lyrics that feel like late-night confessions. E and his band swing from big, ragged choruses to near-whispers in seconds, but it’s never out of place.

Like the hills, everything feels like it was meant to be.

The final track, Manchild, opens with a line so flat it almost falls off the record: “I’m not having any fun.” Followed by a timestamp — “Friday, five sixteen p.m.”

It’s not about metaphors or flourishes, it isn’t trying too hard to do anything, it’s just someone too numb to dress it up. Like my sister halfway up Cadair Idris, rethinking every life choice that led her to that cursed mountain in the rain.

The slow picking electric guitar paired with E’s fuzzed-out melancholy is a fitting finisher as it ends with background hum, distant chatter, and soft crackle — like the lights coming on in a café at the end of Fairbourne beach. Not goodbye. Just closing time.

Over the years Beautiful Freak has transformed into more than a record.

E’s grief, his wit, his weight — they’ve been dissected, praised, mythologised. But for me, it’s simpler than that.

Beautiful Freak helped shape a childhood, to colour in a place made of myth, mud, and memory. It became our beloved…

Hang on, did I mention Shrek?

All photos of Wales by Nick Walton

*Since acquiring the pirate copy of this record it has been purchased in multiple formats by multiple family members.