Tom Waits: Bone Machine (Island/PLG)

ON THE five years following his last studio album, Tom Waits moved to the country and became a family man. The influences of wife, children, small towns, and middle age are apparent on Bone Machine, but not in the icky, degeneratively macho, beer-bellied, and balding ways we've come to expect from aging rock stars. Instead of compromising his way to the old rockers' farm, Waits keeps getting weirder — and better — proving that you can live life in sinful disgrace and come out somehow purer in the end.