Lord of the Black Rider

Broadwayworld.com has an interesting interview with Christopher Nightingale, the orchestrator and musical supervisor of The Lord of the Rings, who mentions Tom Waits was briefly considered for the the score:

The breakthrough for us came in a stage production called The Black Rider, by Tom Waits. The interesting title is pure coincidence - believe it or not it has nothing to do with the Black Riders of The Lord of the Rings. Waits' song is from an opera he wrote with the novelist William Burroughs in the early ‘90s. It wasn't that we wanted to adopt and use The Black Rider, or imitate it, or commission Tom Waits to compose something similar for our score (although we did briefly kick that idea around), but there was a dark and chaotic quality to the piece that clearly revealed how what we wanted to do could be done. Here were tangible ways into music unlike anything we’d heard before on a musical theatre stage.