Tom Waits had gotten more and more worked up, and was now just shouting random-sounding phrases: “Eight hundred pounds of nitro!” “I have a French companion!” “I’ll Be Gone” seemed in some way like an antidote to the feeling summed up by the new Cranberries single, “When You’re Gone”: its syrupy fifties doo-wop harmonies reproducing, again and again, the dreamy, layered awfulness of everything without you. How could I work it so that I would be gone?
