Tom Waits moves from gravel-raw hobo-rock to tender jazz-crooner torch songs, has one foot in blues-roots traditionalism and one ear to modern sounds, and inhabits various fictional personae and pours out his heart like a bottle. If his earlier career was built on engaging with the living repository of 20th century American music and culture, then his latter career engaged with German cabaret tradition of Brecht and Weill.

Bone Machine (1992) is a stripped-down approach to music comes a tightly-arranged, percussion-heavy style with no frills. The album is noted for its dark lyrical themes of death and murder and the junkyard/industrial percussion-driven sound at the core of this album.

'Who are You' is from Bone Machine and it was co-written by Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennen:

The sleeve-artwork can be seen as evoking an aura of white-heat, sheet metal and crackling electricity: a machine. Yet, as the title suggests, it is an animalistic machine, a bone machine, that has an apocalyptic tone that disrupts and destabilizes conventions. The shambling percussive backbone of the songs is pushed up in the mix, turning the songs inside-out and making rhythm the raw focal point.