It consists of songs Waits and Kathleen Brennan wrote for Robert Wilson's opera Woyzeck.

Per Dan Cohen, "Nineteenth-century German poet Georg Buchner's story Woyzeck, about a soldier driven mad by bizarre army experiments and infidelity, incurs music Waits calls 'flesh and blood, earthbound; carnal ... Tin Pan Alley meets the Weimar Republic.'

Like all Waits' efforts since Swordfishtrombones ('83), it's stylistically varied, with an overall production 'patina'--in this case a dry, raspy shibui (the Japanese word for dilapidation) sound personified by the pod (a 4-foot-long Indonesian bean shaker), marimbas and a 57-whistle pneumatic calliope that reverberated for five miles in the Sonoma shack where the CDs were recorded.

Imagine something you could hear three miles away, and now you're right in front of it, in a studio...playing it like a piano, and your face is red, your hair is sticking up, you're sweating.

"[14] The song "Shiny Things" appears in Wilson's Wozzeck but not on Blood Money; it was later released on Waits's Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006).

Maddy Costa writes of Alice and Blood Money: "Bearing in mind that both albums were recorded in the same sessions, share the same musicians and use much the same instrumentation, the similarities are hardly surprising.

His songs have long been preoccupied with society's outsiders, with murder and desire... the best songs on Blood Money merrily rework the skewed rhythms and whirling textures that are Waits's trademark...Waits and Brennan dive into the corrupt, merciless world of Woyzeck with relish; their lyrics are perkily savage, cheerfully nihilistic.

'I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby, for a buck,' snipes 'God's Away on Business', while 'Starving in the Belly of a Whale' warns: 'If you live in hope you're dancing to a terrible tune.'

He preferred it to Alice, calling Blood Money "a more consistent record, albeit unbalanced by arbitrary thematic commitments.

But rather than building off each other, the four life-sucks songs, only 'Everything Goes to Hell' less than inspired, protest too much... Maybe the reason his bandleading stands out so is that, for all his joy in language, it best articulates his deepest compulsion, which is to reject a corrupt present without wallowing in a romanticized past.

Because the contrasts of Alice and Blood Money perfectly highlight the two aspects of Waits's musical character that have been colliding in his work for decades.

On the other hand, he has shown a lifelong desire to unbuckle those pretty melodies... here, on Alice and Blood Money, you can see it all together, side-by-side.