The announcement that Ace Records is releasing a Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan tribute compilation in May, with nineteen artists covering songs they had a hand in writing, is the kind of news that deserves more than a two-paragraph item. Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow, out May 29, features Bruce Springsteen, the late Johnny Cash, Ramones, Willie Nelson, Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, and a dozen others. Waits and Brennan apparently selected many of the artists themselves. If you are trying to understand what Tom Waits means to other musicians, this tracklist is its own kind of argument.

The first thing worth noting is that nobody on this list is doing it as a favor. Bruce Springsteen covering “Jersey Girl” at a 1981 Meadowlands show is a document of a songwriter recognizing someone else’s song as an extension of his own worldview. Waits wrote “Jersey Girl” and Springsteen turned it into something that sounded like it had always belonged to the E Street Band. That kind of cover, the one where the interpreter is not doing an impression but is genuinely inhabiting the song, is the standard the whole compilation is implicitly aiming at.

Brennan is the less-acknowledged half of what is always been a genuine songwriting partnership. Waits himself has said she “rescued” him, that she is “the brains behind Pa.” Brennan pushed his writing toward stranger territory in the 1980s, co-writing the Swordfishtrombones era material that broke from his earlier Tom Waits as Weimar-era barfly persona and became something far more unclassifiable. Including her name in the compilation’s framing is a long-overdue corrective to the way her contribution has often been absorbed into his larger mythology without getting much credit of its own.

Consider the range of what is being covered here. The Blind Boys of Alabama take “Way Down in the Hole,” which most people know from The Wire and which sounds like it was written in a tent revival in 1939, except it was not, Waits wrote it in 1987. Diana Krall covers “Temptation,” a song that exists somewhere between cabaret and vaudeville with a country music posture borrowed from nobody. Ramones cover “I Don’t Want to Grow Up,” which is one of the more surreal choices on paper and one of the most logical once you think about it for five seconds. The Ramones always shared Waits’s fundamental conviction that some things should stay simple and direct no matter how complicated the world gets around them.

The Alison Krauss and Robert Plant pairing on “Trampled Rose” is interesting given what their Raising Sand collaboration showed about their shared taste for songs that refuse to locate themselves in any particular era. Joan Baez closing the album with “Day After Tomorrow,” the anti-war letter home from an Iraq War soldier, is the most overtly political choice on the collection and one of Waits’s most straightforward pieces of writing. That Baez is the one singing it makes sense in a way that is hard to articulate but feels immediately right.

What a compilation like this illuminates is the question of why Waits has attracted this kind of sustained reverence across such completely different musical contexts. The answer is probably that his songs are fundamentally about outsiders and failures and moments of grace in unlikely places, which is a set of subjects that never dates out and that musicians from virtually any tradition can find a way into. He is not genre. He is not era. He is just a particular angle of vision, and it turns out a lot of people share it.

The larger question the compilation raises is about cover songs in general: what do they actually do? At their worst, they are exercises in brand extension or nostalgia-signaling. At their best, as here, they are acts of interpretation that reveal something about both the song and the artist performing it. Cash covering “Down There by the Train” is not just a tribute to Waits. It is evidence of a conversation between two American originals about what this country has always done to the people who fall through its cracks.

Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow arrives May 29 on Ace Records. It is worth clearing the calendar for.