Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which was then nominated for the 1993 Mercury Music Award. In February 1996, he held a benefit performance to raise funds for the legal defense of his friend Don Hyde, who had been charged with distributing LSD. He also contributed two songs to the soundtrack album of the film Dead Man Walking, released that year, while he then contributed another song to the 1997 film The End of Violence. In 1998, Island released Beautiful Maladies, a compilation of 23 Waits tracks from his five albums with the company; he had been allowed to select the tracks himself. That year, Waits also produced and funded Weiss's album, Extremely Cool, as a favor to his old friend. Mule Variations and Woyzeck: 1999–2003 After his contract with Island expired, Waits decided not to try to renew it, particularly as Blackwell had resigned from the company. He signed to a smaller record label, Anti-, recently launched as an offshoot of the punk-label Epitaph Records. He described the company as "a friendly place". The president of Anti-, Andy Kaulkin, said the label was "blown away that Tom would even consider us. We are huge fans." Waits himself praised the label: "Epitaph is a label run by and for artists and musicians, where it feels much more like a partnership than a plantation ... We shook on the deal over a coffee in a truck stop. I know it's going to be an adventure." In March 1999, Anti- released his album Mule Variations. Waits had been recording the tracks at Prairie Sun since June 1998. The tracks often dealt with themes involving rural life in the United States and were influenced by the early blues recordings made by Alan Lomax; Waits coined the term "surrural" ("surreal" and "rural") to describe the album's contents. On its release, Mule Variations reached number 30 on the U.S. Billboard 200, representing the highest showing of a Waits album. The album was critically well received, being named "Album of the Year" by Mojo magazine, and was given a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. On the Grammy categorization of the album as folk music, Waits noted: "That's not a bad thing to be called if you've got to be in some kind of category." Also in March 1999, Waits gave his first live show in three years at Paramount Theater, Austin, Texas as part of