Real Gone is the sixteenth studio album by Tom Waits, released October 4, 2004 in Europe, and October 5 in United States on the ANTI- label. The album was supported by the Real Gone Tour, playing sold out locations in North America and Europe in October and November 2004. The album features some of the few political songs Waits has written, the most explicit being "Day After Tomorrow", a song Waits has described as an "elliptical" protest against the Iraq War. It was chosen by the editors of Harp Magazine as the best album of 2004. Brain – percussion (tracks Read more on Last.fm.
Like a possessed Pentacostal preacher, Tom Waits has spent much of his later career descending deeper into his richly flawed warble. His voice, a combination of post middle age Bob Dylan and what sounds like a hundred pack a week habit, is an instrument all its own, part carnival barker and part bum on the streets. On Real Gone, the depth of that instrument is explored, in the back country tales of woe, greed and murder that Waits purists expect. The songs, now devoid of the keyboards that typically rounded him out, are skeletal and primal, oozing with Bible black sentiment. With head rounders like “Hoist That Rag” and cattle calls like “Top Of The Hill”, Waits lives up to his street poet notoriety. This is Waits unloading characters like freight, with names right of a Flannery O’Conner story. It’s also very American, in the most non-machismo patriotic kind of way. There’s more than a worm in this guys tequila….there’s an essay.