Mule Variations

In describing the origin of the album title, Tom Waits said in a 1999 interview:

My wife said, “I didn’t marry a man, I married a mule.” That’s what she said. You know, it’s like the Goldberg Variations. Only these are the mule variations. People don’t write as much about animals as they should. Perhaps they will now in the future, I don’t know. No, it’s just one of those titles that stuck. I don’t know what people are going to think Mule Variations are. We’d done the song, “Get Behind the Mule.” We’d done it several times. We did a Chinese version, and we did a cha-cha version, and a raga version – and a cappella. And so, at one point, somebody mentioned that we had all these different variations on the same song. We had these mule variations. So we started referring to the record as Mule Variations, but in kind of a humorous way. And then it stuck.