Blood Money uses the same template and players as Alice (released at the same time in 2002) and first saw life as an opera production by Robert Wilson. It's Waits's treatment of Georg Buchner's 1837 socio-political play, Woyzekwhich premiered in 2000 in Copenhagen. It's a dark morality play performed in a style where a barker from a medicine show is mysteriously transported to the weimar republic via tin pan alley. Disturbing and delirious when it's not romantic and hilarious, the songs have a much more direct emotional appeal than the surrealistic Alice.