Real Gone by Tom Waits

Real Gone, Tom Waits' sixteenth studio album, came out on Anti- in October 2004, with Kathleen Brennan, his wife and longtime creative partner, in the producer's chair. By then the gravel-voiced chronicler of the adrift and the downtrodden had spent two decades hauling his songs away from the folk clubs and toward the junkyard, and this one is as clattering and experimental as anything he'd made, a record that sounds hammered together from scrap.

It's also, unusually for Waits, a political record. "Day After Tomorrow" is his sidelong protest against the Iraq War, one he called elliptical, and it lands harder for not shouting. The editors of Harp Magazine named it the best album of 2004, and the Real Gone Tour sold out rooms across North America and Europe that fall. "Hoist That Rag" is the one that found its way onto the countdowns. In 2017 Waits and Brennan oversaw a remixed, remastered edition.

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