“If you break open a song, you’ll find the eggs of other songs,” Waits said to Sasha Frere-Jones in this week’s New Yorker (subscription required, as usual.) "Last Leaf" is sort of a more defiant take on ideas Waits wrote about in a pair songs from his Black Rider album from 1993. The bone-chilling "November," which whistles with theremin and ends with one of my all-time favorite insults, "Go away you rainsnout/Go away, blow your brains out." And the very similarly titled, "The Last Rose of Summer."

I liked how Waits chose roses, in the Pitchfork interview, as the hypothetical theme of a set list Bob Dylan might play on his Sirius radio show. Waits, like many songwriters, writes about roses a lot. But after that last rose of summer does finally die, who will put a rose on its grave?

Maybe Keith?

Here is an amazing video that I'd never seen before of Keith bringing Waits around backstage at a Stones concert (in what would seem to be the '90s?) It's a little bit uncomfortable, in that Ron Wood seems to be very high, and somewhat aggressive, and appears to offer Waits cocaine, which he declines. And Joe Elliott from Def Leppard is there, too. And producer Don Was.

Keith and Waits first worked together on Waits's Rain Dogs album in 1985. Their voices sound terrific together. (The video below shows a blank screen while the music plays. Which is maybe an intentional nod to the song's title? God, it's such a great song.)

And in the way that that stubborn last leaf they're singing in the voice of nowadays hangs on like a vestigial tail, it's much like "That Feel" from Waits' 1992, which is, as they say, harder to get rid of than tattoos.

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Sometime this summer, Willyard will likely be able to purchase a tablespoon-size portion of the dirt into which New York Yankee's star Derek Jeter will have dug his cleats if and when he gets the 3,000th hit of his career. There are big plans to exhume the batter's box and sell it in capsules that hang from keychains, etc.

“That bucket of dirt will go a long way,” said Brandon Steiner, the chairman of Steiner Sports, who has a memorabilia partnership with the Yankees and a marketing deal with Jeter.

But once you buy it, you can do whatever you want with it.

In honor of the approach of Jeter's milestone accomplishment and the impressive consumerist frenzy that will follow, and of Willyard's forthcomingness, here are sixteen great songs about dirt. A veritable smorgasbord!

I think that song is actually called "Downtown Dirt," not "Uptown Dirt." Either way, I love it. (The way Lou Reed writes about dirt, and dirty things, too, like boulevards, etc., makes you wonder whether he has a geophagist past himself. I wouldn't be surprised.)

There are a million songs about dirty things—work, pool, South—but dirty boots would seem to dirty with actual dirt, soil, of the kind that geophagists might like to eat. So that's the organizing principle in effect here.

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There are other crappy months, to be sure. In fact, these last couple years, they all seem pretty crappy, don't they? August is miserably hot. And February is freezing. But August is still summer, and some people get to go on vacation. And February, while also being cursed by stupid spelling (shouldn't we just drop the silent "r" at this point?) and the horribleness of Valentine's Day, is blessedly short. November we get a full thirty increasingly dark days, each bursting with things to complain about.

First of all, the weather. The pleasant briskness in the air will soon turn malevolent. Biting wind will blow all the leaves that have been such pretty colors lately off the trees because they're dead. That sweater that was fun to take out and wear a couple weeks ago won't feel so great bundled under the big puffy coat that there's never enough room for in any restaurant or bar or closet in the city, and you will lose two hats, two scarves and one glove of three different pairs of gloves before winter even officially begins. The rain will be cold.

There's Halloween candy everywhere. This particularly sucks if you're a parent of a five year-old for whom sugar has an effect not unlike that of Four Loko. (At night, after he's asleep, you will eat most, if not all, of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in the bowl. For his sake. You don't want him to get cavities. You know it will make you fatter, and your tri-gliceride cholesterol level is already problematically high, but you will sacrifice your own health for his.) Plus the environmentally damaging, vitamin D-leeching, gloom-inducing end of Daylight Savings Time. And of the baseball season. And election day happens—this year seemingly bound to yield the most depressing results since six years ago, when we showed the rest of the world how happy we were with our then-current administration.

The whole major bummer of a month is of course heading to Thanksgiving, when we will endure the mind-blowing frustration of the worst travel day of the year (how is Due Date different from Planes, Trains & Automobiles, by the way? It's not different, right?) so that we can gather with our families for a meal and fighting that leads to tears.

Oh, and Wyclef comes back.

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1) The story, of a man who has sold his soul to the devil for immortality and the power to cross into parallel dimensions, seems particularly well-suited to Gilliam's darkly comic psychedelia.

2) It is Heath Ledger's last work. He died part way through filming.

3) Along with Heath Ledger, it also stars Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell-making it a sort of big-screen menagerie of Hollywood hot boys.

4) Along with them, it also stars Tom Waits and Christopher Plummer-who own two of the English-speaking world's greatest speaking voices.

5) Tom Waits plays the devil, which is basically a role that's been waiting for him to play since the bible-or at least since he wrote and recorded "Way Down In the Hole" for his 1987 album, Frank's Wild Years. (That song, of course, was also the theme song for The Wire.)

6) "I don't know why he thought of me," said Waits, of Gilliam, in an immensely enjoyable self-interview Pitchfork's report sends us to. "I was raised in the church."

Besides the movie, in the interview, Waits discusses everything from his favorite songs to obscure word origins to the scariest things he can think of. To the question of how he'd compare two guitarists he's worked with, Marc Ribot and Smokey Hormel, he answers: "Octopus have eight and squid have ten tentacles, each with hundreds of suction cups and each have the power to burst a man's artery. They have small birdlike beaks used to inject venom into a victim. Some gigantic squid and octopus with one hundred foot tentacles have been reported. Squids have been known to pull down entire boats to feed on the disoriented sailors in the water. Many believe unexplained, sunken deep-sea vessels, and entire boat disappearances are the handiwork of giant squid." Oh yes. It is well-worth reading the whole thing.

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