347. Mo'Ju on Tom Waits 'Blue Valentine' (1978)

Today one Australia’s most compelling artists, Mo’Ju, joins me for a celebration of the love child of Raymond Chandler and the Cookie Monster, Tom Waits, and his classic 1978 album ‘Blue Valentine’. We talk about the Tom Waits musical universe, how Waits uses a clearly defined persona to keep his private life private, the film noir sensibility that pervades Waits’ lyrics, how Mo’Ju chased the sound of Waits’ records in her early music, how Waits made the grotesque and the mundane beautiful, the different definitions of authenticity in art, double standards around lyrical content for different types of artists and much more.