I don’t know if anyone has ever proposed an analogue for the prose poem in the occasional spoken-word tracks you get on rock albums, but Tom Waits is a master of this resting-the-vocal-cords mode. He has said of this track, from Mule Variations(1999), that it was a tribute to the “word jazz” of Ken Nordine: “I wasn’t able to get it to fly as a song, so I just took the words and started saying them”. The result is an intimately creepy narration that wavers in and out of rhyming couplets, like the speaker of a Browning monologue gone to seed, revealing as much about his own paranoia as about the neighbour he is spying on: “What’s he building in there? I’ll tell you one thing, he’s not building a playhouse for the children”. I first heard it around 2001, when I briefly lived in the States, and its growling menace — delivered over a clanging soundscape of midnight DIY — seems prophetic of the domestic paranoia that would grip the country after 9/11. The way Waits stretches out the phrase “he used to have a consulting business in Indonesia” oozes bar-stool xenophobia. 

First released on the album Mule Variations, Anti-, 1999 and available here