A new Tom Waits tribute compilation has arrived, and unlike most tribute albums, it does not collapse under the weight of its own reverence. The collection brings together Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, and the Ramones covering Waits songs, and the results are frequently excellent, occasionally revelatory, and almost never what you would expect.

The Cash contribution lands hardest. His reading of a Waits ballad strips everything back to voice and a near-skeletal arrangement, and what emerges is something that feels less like a cover and more like a conversation between two men who understood that songs were not entertainment but survival. Cash’s voice is weathered in a way that rhymes with Waits’ own wrecked magnificence. You believe every word.

Springsteen takes a different approach, which is exactly right. His version leans into the working-class imagery in the original, finding a kinship in the subject matter that makes the song feel genuinely his. Springsteen has always been a generous interpreter of other people’s work, but here he brings something specific, an understanding of what it means to sing about men who are tired and women who are gone and bars that never close.

Then there are the Ramones. The Ramones covering Tom Waits should not work. It does. Their version runs about ninety seconds faster than the original and has no patience for the original’s sadness, which turns out to be the only way the Ramones could possibly approach anything. There is a genuine joy in the collision of those two musical worlds that the song actually benefits from.

The rest of the compilation is solid without scaling those heights. Some tracks are careful in ways that become cautious, and caution is the enemy of Waits’ music, which has always been about what happens when you get too close to the edge and find you cannot pull back. But the best moments here remind you why Waits has inspired this kind of devotion from such a wide range of artists for fifty years.

He wrote songs that were structurally simple and emotionally bottomless, and that combination is harder to achieve than almost anyone makes it look. This compilation mostly does justice to that.