As some of you already know, I’m a longtime Tom Waits fan. And for most of my fandom, I’ve regarded Waits with the kind of affectionate bemusement one reserves for musical geniuses whose oeuvre is comprised primarily of love ballads about one-eyed prostitutes arranged with a broken unicycles and wheezing calliopes as backing instrumentation. But lately, as the disturbing reality of the global economic hole we’re all gradually sliding into becomes more starkly concrete, his music has started to resonate with me in a whole new way. Much of it, I realize, takes the Great Depression era as a kind of thematic jumping-off point; his is a world of junked cars and hobos riding the rails, of damaged, used-up people in a world on its way to Hell, who construct their lives from cast-off trash but are full of pride and would die to protect their honor. (His beautiful song Home I’ll Never Be, itself a cast-off buried on his three-disc compilation of unreleased material, Orphans, is a perfect example: )The lyrics to many of his songs read like laments and dirges, but the music is full of defiant hope — hope in the face of a crushing reality. Suddenly, I can almost relate.

I guess what I’m trying to put forth here is this: Waits’ music has always felt both behind the times and ahead of its time — but now, finally, the world has caught up. Suddenly, this is the music of our times. It’s relevant. For instance, every time I check the balance of my IRA account, Rains on Me comes immediately to mind:

In a darker key, Yesterday is Here expresses much the same thing:

If you want money in your pocket
and a top hat on your head
a hot meal on your table
and a blanket on your bed
well today’s grey skies
tomorrow’s tears
you’ll have to wait ’til yesterday is here.

Most economists predict the recession will last well into next year, if not longer. When faced with that kind of news, you have two options: you can give up, or you can dig in — set your jaw, put your head down and Get Behind the Mule.

Until things improve, we might have to endure a few privations. Missions and soup kitchens are reporting ever-increasing numbers of customers — many of them first-time assistance-seekers — and despite crashing retail prices and absurd sales, people have less and less money to spend. “Stores are open, but I ain’t go no money,” Waits wails in Cold Water:

As they struggle to save themselves from insolvency, retail businesses are offering bargains galore, and doing it in bold print, ever-louder commercials and increasingly desperate street-corner sign-twirlers. Step Right Up!

As dark as things get, though, there will always be optimists. That’s what many cable news financial analysts are paid to be: they look for the silver lining, and get us to pay attention by dreaming out loud of a candy-colored future beyond the recession. But the more the bad news drowns them out, the more they sound like pathetic, drunk hobos singing about The Big Rock Candy Mountain:

When I was little, I sometimes found myself wondering fearfully if my family would ever suddenly run out of money one day, and become destitute beggars. As it turned out, I had nothing much to worry about, but I remember how worrying about money — even in the limited way that a seven-year-old can do so — was a deeply unsettling thing to me as a kid, even moreso than it is now. With that in mind, if I had kids right now, I’m not sure I’d be totally up front with them about a family financial crisis; what good would that kind of doom-and-gloom do them? Put on a happy face, I say, or their Bedtime Stories may turn into this: