The new Tom Waits tribute compilation is not the first and will not be the last. It features Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, and the Ramones among the artists covering his songs, which tells you something about the breadth of his appeal and something else about why covering him is such an irresistible project for musicians across virtually every genre. What it raises, more than anything, is the question of why Waits specifically draws so many people to his songs when they want to say something they cannot quite say in their own words.

Part of the answer is structural. Waits writes songs that have strong enough bones to survive radical reinterpretation. “Tom Traubert’s Blues” has been covered as a country ballad, a folk lament, and a rock arrangement without losing what it is about. “Downtown Train” became a Rod Stewart pop hit that bears almost no resemblance to the original in mood and yet works on its own terms. “Jersey Girl” became a Springsteen standard. The songs have architecture, not just atmosphere.

But the more interesting answer is about voice and persona. Waits has one of the most singular voices in American music, not just his actual singing voice but his entire mode of expression. The growl, the whiskey-soaked surrealism, the Depression-era imagery, the carny-barker theatricality. When you cover a Tom Waits song, you are not just covering a melody and some chords. You are entering a whole world of reference and style, and the interesting covers are the ones that translate that world into their own idiom rather than imitate his.

Cash’s famous American Recordings covers showed what that kind of translation could do. His version of songs by Nine Inch Nails, Nick Cave, and others worked precisely because Cash brought his own legend to bear on the material, so the result was a conversation between two large presences rather than a tribute act. The best Waits covers work similarly. You hear what the covering artist understood about the song, which sometimes reveals things in the song itself that were not obvious.

Springsteen has covered “Jersey Girl” since the early 1980s and it has become so associated with him that younger listeners often do not know it is a Waits song. That kind of total assimilation is the highest form of the cover, the point at which the song truly belongs to the interpreter as well as the writer. It says something about Waits’s generosity as a songwriter that he has always seemed at peace with this.

The Ramones factor in a Waits tribute is the most surprising and the most revealing. What do the Ramones and Tom Waits share? More than you might think. Both were committed to a stripped-down version of American music that rejected the bloat of their era. Both were romantics who did not want to be seen as romantics. Both built personas that were so consistent they became mythology. The Ramones covering Waits is absurdist until you think about it, and then it makes a certain kind of perfect sense.

Waits himself has always been generous about covers of his work, once saying that a song doesn’t have a gender or a fixed sound and can be whatever the person making it needs it to be. That attitude, as much as any structural quality of his songs, is what makes him such an enduring source for other artists. He wrote songs with space in them. Space for other people’s voices. Space for meaning that he did not put there and maybe did not intend. That is the mark of a songwriter who is doing something more than craft.

The compilation landing now is a reminder of that catalog, which spans from the piano balladry of his early Asylum years through the clanging, rain-soaked industrial folk of Rain Dogs and Bone Machine and into the theatrical later work. Across all of it, the songs hold. The bones are there. That is why people keep coming back to them.