Real Gone

Waits and Brennan wrote and produced the record, which has fifteen tracks and, for the first time, no piano. He recorded it in an abandoned schoolhouse in Locke, California. Waits beatboxes on Top of the Hill and Metropolitan Glide, a technique he picked up from his interest in hip-hop, and Marc Ribot plays in a Cuban style on Hoist That Rag. Hoskyns called it Waits's roughest, most unkempt music to date.

Day After Tomorrow, the most explicit of its political songs, Waits described as an elliptical protest against the Iraq War. Don't Go into That Barn was based on a New York Times story about a slave jail in Kentucky. The album came out on 4 October 2004 in Europe and the next day in the US, and the editors of Harp magazine chose it as the best album of 2004. Waits's only London date on the tour drew 78,000 applications for about 3,700 tickets. Paste found some songs too long, while Pitchfork praised the lyrics and singing. A remixed and remastered edition followed on 22 November 2017, overseen by Waits and Brennan.