A month after the deadly shooting that killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, thousands of Madison-area students rally to demand gun control and measures to improve school safety.

Some singers are born with the voices of angels, some with voices like bags of gravel. Both, I’d say, are blessed in their own way. Take the haunting, unforgettable Blind Willie Johnson, the weirdo genius Captain Beefheart, and, of course, the inimitable Tom Waits, whose mercurial persona has expressed itself as a down-and-out lounge singer, junkshop bluesman, Tin Pan Alley raconteur, Broadway showman, and more. Each iteration seems to get grittier than the last as age weathers Waits’ sandpaper voice to a rougher and rougher cut.

Waits first emerged in 1973 with Closing Time, an album Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden described as “all-purpose lounge music… a style that evokes an aura of crushed cigarettes in seedy bars and Sinatra singing ‘One for My Baby.’” Though Waits is “more than a chip off the Randy Newman block,” Holden wrote, “he sounds like a boozier, earthier version of the same.” The description might cause some fans of Waits who discovered him ten years later with Swordfishtrombones to furrow their brows. Sure, we may always hear some Sinatra in his songwriting or delivery, but a Randy Newman-like lounge singer? A little hard to feature…. As Noel Murray notes at The Onion’s A.V. Club, “Swordfishtrombones has sounded more and more like a baseline for ‘normal’” in Waits’ oeuvre.

Although he has always drawn liberally from music of the past, in the 80s and 90s, he reached further back in time for his influences and instrumentation—into the back corners of early 20th-century outsider gospel and washtub blues, 19th-century sea shanties and murder ballads. For all his avant-garde bona fides—including his many collaborations with experimental guitarist Marc Ribot—few contemporary artists as Waits best exemplify the “old, weird America” Luc Sante describes as the “playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes.” Each of these at one time or another is a character Waits has played in song.