With no rehearsals, working live and most often going with the first or second take, some great performances were captured over the next two nights. With a minimum of overdubs, the album was completed, mixed and mastered in four more sessions stretching over a two-week period.

Sung in a voice that is both weary and urgent, the album kicks open with "Before I’m Dead," a song about a vague memory of something real. "Packaging the heat, flashing the flash, nothing is real, nothing going to last," quickly summarizes the sublime ridiculousness of our pop culture.

The album closes with "Racine," a day-into-night-into-dawn artist’s tale of hard fought dignity in the face of broken dreams and failed desires. In between, "Blues 4 Lenny," a rambling jazz poem, takes a roller coaster ride through the guts of experience. "It’s Hard," a song that has its seeds in NYC, is an eerie needle-to-the-bone piece that juxtaposes surreal imagery and free-flow prose against a heroin groove, exposing a culture that survives by feeding upon itself.

The following track, "Great Big Lie," is a sprawling, travelling epic through the underbelly of the great American dreamscape that explodes both its myths and truths. In "Revolution", Tom’s harmonica comes in like a Spanish trumpet as it bends around a descending guitar line, announcing a song about conscience and destiny that couldn’t be more poignant for these times.

The title song, "Tombstone Boys, Graveyard Girls," is a track that has the spook written all over it, a gothic midnight ramble in pursuit of beauty through a troubled world that reaches deep into the soul of the poet. "Walking Back To Tupelo," with its swelling B3, foreboding guitar riff, and tribal voodoo feel, is, on the surface, a pilgrimage of salvation back to the rambling, gambling spirit and soul of the blues. "Standing In The Rain", with its simmering guitar driven beat, takes you down those lonely streets of late-night bars, desperate lovers and one-night stands.

Down in a deep southern groove, "South To Alabam," is the tale of a carnie looking to get back home to his girl. His straight ahead, yet somehow profound road weary insights of people and the world at hand are in sharp contrast to the endless babble and neuroses that seems to plague most of modern society. From his time in Texas, you can hear the dusty winds of Mexico starting to blow through Tom’s blood in songs such as "Maria," a deeply romantic, tender song of lovers torn apart by forces beyond control.