( continues...) Musically his voice is limited. As an instrument to express character and language? It's vast.

I'd explore Waits' language, which is distinctively allusive, playful, and mythic. He has a unique gift for braiding metaphors out of nursery rhymes and carny barker spiels and blues tropes and Mississippi brags . On Swordfishtrombones he traded in his Edward Hopper imagery for something closer to Brueghel. If Brueghel worked for the WPA.

Tom Waits writes famously beautiful melodies and lyrics. Without abandoning either talent, on this record he built a sexy, lurching, inexorable groove chassis out of washtubs and wagon wheels and bedsprings. He's a serious rhythm slut. This needs to be told.

In the seventies there might have been such a thing as a casual Tom Waits fan. Not any more. The music demands more. You're either all the way in, or you don't bother. Since the Frank Trilogy Tom Waits has established himself as something more than a gifted songwriter. He's become an icon to musicians and music fans, a figure of uncompromised vision and integrity. This Tom Waits is capable of a towering snit. He'll get litigious on your ass. For all the romance of failure he once courted, his cranky integrity wouldn't allow his soul to be sold for Fritos. He's also deeply, bountifully loyal to his friends. His rare performances over the last decade have almost all been benefits or memorials. There's an unyielding spine in his sloppy posture; he's a scarecrow that spins in the wind, but won't fall over. He was nobody's drunk, nobody's joke, nobody's shill. Morrisey and Dylan may be the only other songwriters who inspire such obsessive devotion.

I don't see a particular need to interview Tom Waits; there is a vast store of Waits interviews to reference, all carefully maintained online by his devotees. Though if given the opportunity I would be compelled to ask these three questions:

1. Shane MacGowan - blow-dried prettyboy or countrypolitan crooner?

2. Bob Dylan once described himself as some combination of Sleepy John Estes and Mortimer Snerd. What combination of puppet and blues musician best characterizes your music?

3. Interviews have typically described your apparel as "shabby," "rumpled," and "non-descript" - completely ignoring your fashion innovations with hairnets, moustache wax in the eyebrows and alligator shoes. Do you feel like you've been misunderstood as a fashion icon?

Jon, I'm so sorry about your father. My condolences.

All the strength in the world to you, Jon. I am so sorry.

Jon, I am very sorry for your loss.

Joe, I'm afraid KGSR would see my threats as puny and ineffectual. I do hope to ask Richard and Linda about Rafferty's Folly. And Gerry Rafferty, whom I think is still alive.

David, thanks for the link to your friend. I look forward to speaking with him.

I also appreciate reading your pitch. It's so good that I really have no idea how I made the cut. To wit:

Shoot Out The Lights is the most vivid and beautiful examination of emotional devastation ever recorded. Sure, there’s plenty of other contenders out there, like Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Rumours, or George Jones and Tammy Wynette singing “Golden Ring,” but Shoot Out the Lights brings the listener closer to the woozy highs and lows of the end of the affair than any other collection of songs in rock or country music. Richard and Linda Thompson never sang together better, never expressed the emotional subtleties of their songs more expertly, and never sounded more perfect for each other than when they were breaking up.

The 33 1/3 treatment I’m proposing would primarily focus on the context: the personal history driving the songs on Shoot Out The Lights, the difficulty in recording the album, and the subsequent fall-out, while integrating a track-by-track analysis of the lyrical content and music on the album.

The story of the Thompsons’ marriage, though it only lasted for nine years, was particularly tumultuous. When they met, Richard was still scarred from the late ‘60s death of his girlfriend in a bus crash. Linda was as a backup singer on his first solo album (1971’s Henry The Human Fly, allegedly the worst-selling album in the Warner Brothers catalog), and they were married within a year. She had equal billing on the next album, 1972’s I Want To See The Brights Lights Tonight (which regularly appears on best-album lists from Rolling Stone), and the Thompsons worked as collaborators on five more albums until their divorce. Their marriage appears to have been filled with sheer emotional turbulence, with Richard demonstrating a rather generational need to follow his muse regardless of the costs, including a conversion to Islam and two years spent living on a British Muslim commune in the mid-70s, during which his spiritual advisor would not let him touch his guitar (and during which Linda left him twice, only returning because of her pregnancy).

His first two post-commune albums were two of the worst he ever recorded, burying some wonderful songs (and some much less than wonderful) under production flourishes that ranged from disco to Middle Eastern. They sold terribly, and the Thompsons were dumped from their label. In an attempt to make the next album more commercial, the Thompsons hired Gerry Rafferty (yes, the “Stuck In The Middle With You” songwriter) to produce the tracks that would become Shoot Out The Lights. Rafferty’s production was, to put it mildly, an utter disaster (available as a bootleg called Rafferty’s Folly for those who just can’t get enough of great songs buried under boring and dated production). The Thompsons fired Rafferty and re-recorded five songs and three new ones with Joe Boyd, a longtime friend (who just happened to be the noted producer of albums for a who’s who of Brit-folk artists like Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, the Fairport Convention, and the Incredible String Band, not to mention Toots & The Maytals and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd). The result was the timeless clean production of Shoot Out The Lights, an album that sounds like it could have been made at any point between 1971 and 2005. Critics loved the hell out of it, and, like Bright Lights, it regularly pops up on best-album lists from Rolling Stone and Spin.

Before the Thompsons’ 1981 tour, Richard admitted to Linda that he was in love with another woman (the proprietress of the legendary McCabe’s Guitar Shop, no less), which led to a brittle onstage awkwardness between the two, including the occasional mild physical violence. Although Time Magazine declared Linda the female vocalist of 1982, she never reached the heights of (continued...)

( continues...) Shoot Out The Lights again. There was a keyboard-heavy album in 1985 that did not do well, then Linda succumbed to hysterical dysphonia, the psychological inability to sing. After the moderate success of a retrospective in 1996, Linda overcame the dysphonia and recorded an album in 2002. She has played a few limited dates since then, but mostly stays out of music today. Richard Thompson, of course, remains the perennial critical favorite who cannot achieve mainstream success.

Intermittently, while telling the story of the rise and fall of the Thompsons’ marriage, I would discuss the album, track by track. There are only eight songs on the album, and I don’t want this type of analysis to overwhelm the narrative, so I intend to keep these sections succinct and informative. I would examine the lyrics, which combine a fatalist approach to dissolution with a near-philosophical wisdom, and the music, concentrating on not-too-technical reads of the production and guitar sounds. The first track, “Don’t Renege On Our Love” would introduce the early period of the Thompson’s marriage. The second track, “Walking on a Wire” would introduce the commune period, and so on.

Strangely enough, the only current Richard Thompson biography (called simply Richard Thompson: The Biography by Patrick Humpries, which I intend to use as a secondary source) manages to make the rollercoaster ride of the Thompson’s marriage and the recording of Shoot Out The Lights into an immensely boring affair, which I attribute to Humphries’s barebones writing style. I intend to interview Richard Thompson, Linda (Thompson) Kenis, their son Teddy Thompson, Joe Boyd, Simon Nichol and Dave Mattacks (of the Fairport Convention), Martin Carthy (another longtime friend who was the spiritual father of the late 60s/early 70s Brit-folk scene), Gerry Rafferty, and anyone else I can find who can shed light on the Thompsons’ marriage and Shoot Out The Lights.

Shoot Out The Lights is a good candidate for the 33 1/3 treatment because it has a built-in audience in Richard Thompson fans, a group whose numbers have swollen immensely in the last decade, many of whom are starving for a better book than the lackluster biography. The album was remastered and re-released in 2004. I don’t know about its total lifetime sales, but I do know that Richard Thompson fans tend to be both fanatical and bookish, which ought to be worth something.

See? Leaden, dull, prolix. It's much worse than I remembered.

I'm thinking about expanding on the whole issue of Richard Thompson's generational belief that following his muse was always correct. He made those he loved most suffer in his quest to find himself, and he more or less betrayed his talents on First Light and Sunnyvista. I think Shoot Out The Lights is brilliant because it's the sound of Linda (and, presumably, others in his life) pushing back.

Jon, words fail. I can only offer condolences and vibes for strength.

And yet, Swordfishtrombones wasn't unprecedented. There are hints in his earlier work that point toward it.

Hec, if you haven't in a while, you might give Heartattack and Vine a spin. He's still working a lot of his 70's shtick, with many of the same characters, but the lurching, guitar-driven numbers on the album (the title track, "Mr. Seigel", "Downtown") sound like a direct pre-cursor to the howling, Beefheartian stuff he seemed to pull out of nowhere on i Swordfish. It's also got "Jersey Girl" which was probably his most stunningly gorgeous song to date.

I think this was when he really knew he was trapped in his persona, and by the people he was always working with at the time (I'd guess Bones Howe especially).

Thanks for the condolences. I'm doin' alright (uh huh).

::the role of Hec will be played this morning by JZ, as Hec isn't even halfway through his first cup of coffee::

It's also got "Jersey Girl" which was probably his most stunningly gorgeous song to date.

Hec has mentioned that song in particular a lot around the house if not in the pitch, and I'm fairly sure that it'll get a mention in the book, as he wrote it immediately after meeting Kathleen Brennan; that meeting was the beginning of so very much that led him to Swordfishtrombones.

Jon, I'm so sorry for your loss.