Listening to Tom Waits makes me want to go to hell.

That's not too big of a stretch for me, really. If six years of study in the theatrical arts has taught me anything, it is that being bad is always more fun than being good. Always. Twirling one's mustache as a villain is always more fun than being some Dudley Do-Right on the straight and narrow. Puking out of a car window at a busy intersection is always more fun than being the designated driver. Blowing up mailboxes with illegal fireworks will be a much fonder memory in your twilight years than attending PTA bake sales and speed-walking to cure leukemia. Stolen candy just tastes better. I can't explain it, but it does.

So, yeah, I probably earned myself a one-way ticket to the Fiery Lake a long time ago. What can I say? - Heaven seems like a total gyp. You spend the entire sojourn of your mortal coil abstaining from the undeniable pleasures of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. Then when you die, you find out that you've earned a VIP pass to an endless square dance. The only music is by Enya. The only thing on TV is reruns of “7th Heaven”. The only outfit in your closet is a formless, gender -neutral white robe, and all of the other dorks who live in that One-Horse afterlife with you all have the same duds. Of course, it doesn't really matter, because the only party going on is the one where you dance around God's throne all day and tell him how awesome he is.

Meanwhile, Hell might not have central air conditioning, but every painting I've ever seen which purports to depict eternal damnation feature two of my favorite things – naked ladies and huge pillars of fire. Moreover, the most interesting people on earth are probably going to wind up at that party. Salvador Dali, Rasputin, Charles Manson, every single porn actress, all four of those Golden Girls, Klaus Kinski and Hunter S. Thompson are all frying right now. Can you imagine how badass it would be to live in the same apartment complex with those guys? What if the Marquis De Sade was your roommate? You would never run out of stories. In a land of serial killers, sluts, black metal musicians, wayward priests, drugged-out wackos, and every U.S. President except Abe Lincoln and Jimmy Carter, there is never a boring day.

Also, Tom Waits is probably the Devil. Don't believe me? Check out Blood Money, Tom Waits’ 2002 study in jazzy misanthropy. If you can listen to “Misery is the River of the World” without visualizing skeletons dancing the Charleston next to Tangoing gorgons, all drinking Blue Blazers in a Juke Joint where the walls drip blood – well, you just might be one of the 144,000, preordained for the Rapture.

Originally a collection of songs for the musical Woyzeck, Blood Money is an album that centers around despair, death, atheism, infidelity, and murder. “Misery is the River of the World” is like having Lucifer come out for a quick prologue before the action really starts. Waits barks in his trademark vocals – half saloon rat, half George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, lines like “The Devil knows the Bible like the back of his hand” and “If there's one thing to say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man.” Marimbas ring out, and it’s not hard to imagine them as being made of the exposed rib cages of the damned. A muted, industrial sounding stomp, like the March of the Dead, acts as the spine of the piece – when the piece is in four/four. At certain points, the song breaks into a nauseous descent / ascent of the scale, sinners tossed to and fro, until the fade out when Waits croaks repeatedly that Misery is indeed the river of the world, and we are to row.

Waits, like Satan Himself, is most famous for having beaten his own path. While in Paradise Lost the fallen angel declares that its better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven, Waits similarly decided that playing in the not-so-popular styles of vaudville, ragtime, and blues was better than being just another rock musician. Satan took a third of the host of Heaven with him. Tom Waits is a successful musician and actor who has achieved a cult-like following of his own. It all makes you wonder if he's hiding a pair of horns under that pork pie hat.