After listening to Joe Henry’s stunning new record, Civilians, for the past week, I find myself searching through Webster’s for the word “auteur.” The dictionary reads: “A film director with a strong personal style who exercises total creative control.” Leave it to the French to trump the English with this spot-on description. Though not yet in the movies, Henry, with his cinematic approach to songwriting and sonic textures, qualifies as one of the finest auteurs working in America today.

Here’s a guy who began his ever-evolving career with both feet planted in alt-country’s soil—he even used the twang-laden Jayhawks as his backing band for a few of his best early albums, such as Short Man’s Room and Kindness of the World in the early ‘90s. A Southerner by birth and a Midwesterner by transplant (his own self-description), Henry has broadened his sonic palette over the last decade to include jazz, blues, and a DIY mentality.

Ironically, the more individualized Henry’s music becomes, the more he reminds me of another auteur: the great Tom Waits. The parallel might not be obvious on surface consideration. After all, their vocal styles—fevered growls vs. placid cool—are radically different, as are their personas: junkyard-blues playin’ hobo/wild-man vs. sharply-dressed, old-fashioned balladeer. Yet both men are true artists and pursue inherently unique visions that seem disconnected to any other music out there today.

Both guys started out as traditional singer/songwriters, even if Waits’ was of the more twisted variety in his ’70s piano-balladeer guise (doubtful anyone would have mistaken him for Jackson Browne), but then they morphed into so much more. Like Waits, whose own career can be divided into what came before his pivotal Swordfishtrombones in 1983, and what then came after, Henry’s career can also be split into two distinct phases. Using his landmark record, 1996’s Trampoline, as a marker, it makes sense to divide Henry’s career into the pre-Trampoline material characterized by a more roots-oriented, almost folk template, and what came later, the more adventurous and eclectic blueprint that he’s still shaping today.

Waits’ most striking and polarizing feature has always been his voice, a woozy foghorn of a bellow that often separates the zealots and true believers from those who can’t stomach his guttural lament. I still remember loving his version of “Somewhere” from West Side Story on the album Blue Valentine as a kid, while my sister, a genuine Broadway musical fan, cried heresy. I practically had to hide the record so she wouldn’t burn it at the stake. But I always thought who better to sing about Spanish Harlem and its romanticized, tragic teens than a Bowery-bum-styled poet with a wounded lion of a voice. Louis Armstrong meets Leonard Bernstein. In other words, I always believe Waits when he sings.

Waits’ other galvanizing gift is, of course, his gorgeous lyricism. Inspired by the Beat poets and Bukowski—as well as by Dylan, whose lyrics he used to paste to his bedroom wall as a kid—Waits hijacked his role models’ cascading street imagery and ran away to the carnival with it. Ferris wheels, calliopes, street barkers, red-shoed hookers, gin-soaked sailors, waltzing Matildas, gypsys, tattooed love affairs, train smoke, and yapping Chihuahuas with skin conditions stagger through Waits’ songs like a mad Mardi Gras parade.

I’ve never wanted—or hell, want—to run away and join the circus, say in some shady, Spanish-moss lined fairgrounds in New Orleans, before she drowned, more than I do when I hear Tom Waits. The fugitives say that the streets aren’t for dreaming now—“Tom Traubert‘s Blues.” Indeed.

Waits’ choked rasp steers his “broken but beautiful” aesthetic off the rails and into the ditch—just how he likes it. He claims his wife once told him he only writes two types of songs: “grim reapers and grand weepers,” and there’s truth in that. Waits’ howling gutbucket chanteys are only eclipsed by his blue ballads—lullabies, really, forlorn enough to stunt any baby’s growth. And I can’t get enough of them.