The Black Rider

The Black Rider is the twelfth studio album by Tom Waits, released in 1993 on Island Records. It features studio versions of songs Waits wrote for the play The Black Rider (1990), directed by Robert Wilson and co-written by William S. Burroughs. The play is based on the German short story The Fatal Marksman by Johann August Apel, which had previously been made into an opera by Carl Maria von Weber. It is about a clerk who makes a Faustian bargain for magic bullets, with tragic results. The play premiered on March 31, 1990, at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany. Its world English-language premiere occurred in 1998 at the Edmonton International Fringe Festival. Per the Los Angeles Times, "It's most easily described as a Faustian musical-tragicomedy."

Waits also collaborated with Wilson on Alice (1992) and Woyzeck (2000); the songs for those were released in 2002 on the albums Alice and Blood Money, respectively.