Tom Waits: Albums Collection (1978 - 2009)

In the 1970s, Tom Waits combined a lyrical focus on desperate, low-life characters with a persona that seemed to embody the same lifestyle, which he sang about in a raspy, gravelly voice. From the '80s on, his work became increasingly theatrical as he moved into acting and composing. Growing up in Southern California, Waits attracted the attention of manager Herb Cohen, who also handled Frank Zappa, and was signed by him at the beginning of the 1970s, resulting in the material later released as The Early Years and The Early Years, Vol. 2. His formal recording debut came with Closing Time (1973) on Asylum Records, an album that contained "Ol' 55," which was covered by labelmates the Eagles for their On the Border album. Waits attracted critical acclaim and a cult audience for his subsequent albums, The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), the two-LP live set Nighthawks at the Diner (1975), Small Change (1976), Foreign Affairs (1977), Blue Valentine (1978), and Heart Attack and Vine (1980). His music and persona proved highly cinematic, and, starting in 1978, he launched parallel careers as an actor and as a composer of movie music. He wrote songs for and appeared in Paradise Alley (1978), wrote the title song for On the Nickel (1980), and was hired by director Francis Coppola to write the music for One from the Heart (1982), which earned him an Academy Award nomination. While working on that project, Waits met and married playwright Kathleen Brennan, with whom he later collaborated.

Moving to Island Records, Waits made Swordfishtrombones (1983), which found him experimenting with horns and percussion and using unusual recording techniques. The same year, he appeared in Coppola's Rumble Fish and The Outsiders, and, in 1984, he appeared in the director's The Cotton Club. In 1985, he released Rain Dogs. In 1986, he appeared in Down by Law and made his theatrical debut with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in Frank's Wild Years, a musical play he had written with Brennan. An album based on the play was released in 1987, the same year Waits appeared in the films Candy Mountain and Ironweed. In 1988, he released a film and soundtrack album depicting one of his concerts, Big Time. In 1989, he appeared in the films Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale, Cold Feet, and Wait Until Spring. His work for the theater continued in 1990 when Waits partnered with opera director Robert Wilson and beat novelist William Burroughs and staged The Black Rider in Hamburg, Germany. In 1991, he appeared in the films Queens' Logic, The Fisher King, and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. In 1992, he scored the film Night on Earth; released the album Bone Machine, which won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album; appeared in the film Bram Stoker's Dracula; and returned to Hamburg for the staging of his second collaboration with Robert Wilson, Alice. The Black Rider was documented on CD in 1993, the same year Waits appeared in the film Short Cuts.

A long absence from recording resulted in the 1998 release of Beautiful Maladies, a retrospective of his work for Island. In 1999, Waits finally returned with a new album, Mule Variations. The record was a critical success, winning a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk album, and was also his first for the independent Epitaph Records' Anti subsidiary. A small tour followed, but Waits jumped right back into the studio and began working on not one but two new albums. By the time he emerged in the spring of 2002, both Alice and Blood Money were released on Anti Records. Blood Money consisted of the songs from the third Wilson/Waits collaboration that was staged in Denmark in 2000 and won Best Drama of the Year. After limited touring in support of these two endeavors, Waits returned to the recording studio and issued Real Gone in 2004. The album marked a large departure for him in that it contained no keyboards at all, focusing only on stringed and rhythm instruments. Glitter and Doom Live appeared in 2009. Waits didn't release another studio album of new material until 2011, when he issued Bad as Me on Anti in the Fall. He uncharacteristically issued a track listing two months in advance of the release, and the pre-release title track as a digital single. He also took the unusual step of releasing a video in which he allowed bits of all the album's songs to play while he scolded bloggers and peer-to-peer sites for invading his privacy.

by William Ruhlmann, AMG

Two welcome changes in style made Blue Valentine a fresh listening experience for Tom Waits fans. First, Waits alters the instrumentation, bringing in electric guitar and keyboards and largely dispensing with the strings for a more blues-oriented, hard-edged sound. Second, though his world view remains fixed on the lowlifes of the late night, he expands beyond the musings of the barstool philosopher who previously had acted as the first-person character of most of his songs. When Waits does use the first-person, it's to write a "Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis," not the figure most listeners had associated with the singer himself. The result is a broadening of subject matter, a narrative discipline that makes most of the tunes story songs, and a coherent framing for Waits' typically colorful and intriguing imagery. These are not radical reinventions, but Waits had followed such a rigidly stylized approach on his previous albums that for anyone who had followed him so far, the course correction was big news.

by William Ruhlmann, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Somewhere
2. Red Shoes By The Drugstore
3. Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis
4. Romeo Is Bleeding
5. $29
6. Wrong Side Of The Road
7. Whistlin' Past The Graveyard
8. Kentucky Avenue
9. A Sweet Little Bullet From A Pretty Blue Gun
10. Blue Valentines

Heartattack and Vine, Tom Waits' first album in two years and his last of seven for Asylum Records, is a transitional album, with tracks like the rhythm-heavy title song and "'Til the Money Runs Out" foreshadowing the sonic experiments of the Island albums, while piano-with-orchestra tracks like "Saving All My Love for You" and "On the Nickel" (written as a motion-picture title tune) hark back to Waits' Randy Newman-influenced early days. It is just as well that Waits never entirely gave up on the ballad material; "Jersey Girl," a Drifters-style song, is a winner, and it was appropriated by Bruce Springsteen on his 1981 tour. Also, at least at this point, the rougher tunes all tended to sound the same.

by William Ruhlmann, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Heartattack And Vine
2. In Shades (instrumental)
3. Saving All My Love For You
4. Downtown 5. Jersey Girl
6. 'Til The Money Runs Out
7. On The Nickel
8. Mr. Siegal
9. Ruby's Arms

One From the Heart is the score to the most misunderstood of Francis Ford Coppola's films. Far ahead of its time in terms of technology, use of color, montage, and set design, its soundtrack is the only thing that grounds it to earth. Coppola's movie is a metaphorical retelling of the exploits of Zeus and Hera set in Las Vegas. Coppola claims to have been taken with the male-female narrative implications of the track "I Don't Talk to Strangers," off Tom Waits' Foreign Affairs album. That cut was a duet with Bette Midler. Midler wasn't available for One From the Heart, however, so Waits chose Crystal Gayle as his vocal foil. The result is one of the most beautifully wrought soundtrack collaborations in history. Along with producer Bones Howe, Waits and Gayle cut their duets largely from the studio floor, live with the small combo-style studio band that included the saxophonist Teddy Edwards, drummer Shelly Manne, trumpeter Jack Sheldon, pianist Pete Jolly, and bassist Greg Cohen, among others. The opening cut, a Waits piano intro that flows into the duet "Once Upon a Town," is a study in contrasts: first there are the stark ivories and the tinkle of a coin falling upon a bar before Waits' then-still-smoky baritone (now ravaged indescribably) entwines with Gayle's clear, ringing, emotionally rich vocal, and then joined by Bob Alcivar's string orchestrations before giving way to a jazzed-out down-tempo blues, where the pair sing in call-and-response counterpoint about the disappointments in life and love. These are echoed a couple of tracks later in another duet, "Picking Up After You," which is the ultimate starstruck breakup tune. And while there are only four duets on the entire set, they are startling in their ragged intimacy, contrasted with a stark yet elegant atmosphere and cool noir-esque irony. Gayle's solo performances on the set, which include the mournfully gorgeous "Is There Any Way out of This Dream," with beautiful accompaniment in a tenor solo by Edwards, and the shimmering melancholy of "Old Boyfriends," are among the finest in her long career. For his part, Waits' "I Beg Your Pardon" and "You Can't Unring a Bell" fit deftly into his post-beat hipster canon, though they are offered with less droll irony and more emotionally honest flair here than they would have if they were on his own solo recordings. Likewise, the piano and vocal duet of "Take Me Home" offers Waits' piano as a canny and intuitive counterpart to the deep sensuality of Gayle's vocal. One From the Heart is a welcome addition to any soundtrack library to be sure, but also an essential one to the shelf of any Waits or Gayle fan.

by Thom Jurek, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Opening Montage: Tom's Piano Intro/ Once Upon A Town/ The Wages Of Love (instrumental)
2. Is There Anyway Out Of This Dream?
3. Picking Up After You
4. Old Boyfriends
5. Broken Bicycles
6. I Beg Your Pardon
7. Little Boy Blue
8. Instrumental Montage: The Tango/ Circus Girl
9. You Can't Unring A Bell
10. This One's From The Heart
11. Take Me Home
12. Presents (instrumental)

Between the release of Heartattack and Vine in 1980 and Swordfishtrombones in 1983, Tom Waits got rid of his manager, his producer, and his record company. And he drastically altered a musical approach that had become as dependable as it was unexciting. Swordfishtrombones has none of the strings and much less of the piano work that Waits' previous albums had employed; instead, the dominant sounds on the record were low-pitched horns, bass instruments, and percussion, set in spare, close-miked arrangements (most of them by Waits) that sometimes were better described as "soundscapes." Lyrically, Waits' tales of the drunken and the lovelorn have been replaced by surreal accounts of people who burned down their homes and of Australian towns bypassed by the railroad – a world (not just a neighborhood) of misfits now have his attention. The music can be primitive, moving to odd time signatures, while Waits alternately howls and wheezes in his gravelly bass voice. He seems to have moved on from Hoagy Carmichael and Louis Armstrong to Kurt Weill and Howlin' Wolf (as impersonated by Captain Beefheart). Waits seems to have had trouble interesting a record label in the album, which was cut 13 months before it was released, but when it appeared, rock critics predictably raved: after all, it sounded weird and it didn't have a chance of selling. Actually, it did make the bottom of the best-seller charts, like most of Waits' albums, and now that he was with a label based in Europe, even charted there. Artistically, Swordfishtrombones marked an evolution of which Waits had not seemed capable (though there were hints of this sound on his last two Asylum albums), and in career terms it reinvented him.

by William Ruhlmann, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Underground
2. Shore Leave
3. Dave The Butcher (instrumental)
4. Johnsburg, Illinois
5. 16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six
6. Town With No Cheer
7. In The Neighborhood
8. Just Another Sucker In The Vine
9. Frank's Wild Years
10. Swordfishtrombones
11. Down, Down, Down
12. Soldier's Things
13. Gin Soaked Boy
14. Trouble's Braids
15. Rainbirds (instrumental)

With its jarring rhythms and unusual instrumentation – marimba, accordion, various percussion – as well as its frequently surreal lyrics, Rain Dogs is very much a follow-up to Swordfishtrombones, which is to say that it sounds for the most part like The Threepenny Opera being sung by Howlin' Wolf. The chief musical difference is the introduction of guitarist Marc Ribot, who adds his noisy leads to the general cacophony. But Rain Dogs is sprawling where its predecessor had been focused: Tom Waits' lyrics here sometimes are imaginative to the point of obscurity, seemingly chosen to fit the rhythms rather than for sense. In the course of 19 tracks and 54 minutes, Waits sometimes goes back to the more conventional music of his earlier records, which seems like a retreat, though such tracks as the catchy "Hang Down Your Head," "Time," and especially "Downtown Train" (frequently covered and finally turned into a Top Ten hit by Rod Stewart five years later) provide some relief as well as variety. Rain Dogs can't surprise as Swordfishtrombones had, and in his attempt to continue in the direction suggested by that album, Waits occasionally borders on the chaotic (which may only be to say that, like most of his records, this one is uneven). But much of the music matches the earlier album, and there is so much of it that that is enough to qualify Rain Dogs as one of Waits' better albums.

by William Ruhlmann, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Singapore
2. Clap Hands
3. Cemetery Polka
4. Jockey Full Of Bourbon
5. Tango Till They're Sore
6. Big Black Mariah
7. Diamonds And Gold
8. Hang Down Your Head
9. Time
10. Rain Dogs
11. Midtown (instrumental)
12. 9th And Hennepin
13. Gun Street Girl
14. Union Square
15. Blind Love
16. Walking Spanish
17. Downtown Train
18. Bride Of Rain Dogs (instrumental)
19. Anywhere I Lay My Head





Tracklist:

1. Diamonds On My Windshield
2. (Looking For) The Heart Of Saturday Night
3. Martha
4. The Ghosts Of Saturday Night
5. Grapefruit Moon
6. Small Change
7. Burma Shave
8. I Never Talk To Strangers
9. Tom Traubert's Blues
10. Blue Valentines
11. Potter's Field
12. Kentucky Avenue
13. Somewhere (From 'West Side Story')
14. Ruby's Arms

Tom Waits wrote a song called "Frank's Wild Years" for his 1983 Swordfishtrombones album, then used the title (minus its apostrophe) for a musical play he wrote with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, and toured with in 1986. The Franks Wild Years album, drawn from the show, is subtitled, "un operachi romantico in two acts," though the songs themselves do not carry the plot. Rather, this is just the third installment in Waits' eccentric series of Island Records albums in which he seems most inspired by German art song and carnival music, presenting songs in spare, stripped-down arrangements consisting of instruments like marimba, baritone horn, and pump organ and singing in a strained voice that has been artificially compressed and distorted. The songs themselves often are conventional romantic vignettes, or would be minus the oddities of instrumentation, arrangement, and performance. For example, "Innocent When You Dream," a song of disappointment in love and friendship, has a winning melody, but it is played in a seesaw arrangement of pump organ, bass, violin, and piano, and Waits sings it like an enraged drunk. (He points out the arbitrary nature of the arrangements by repeating "Straight to the Top," done as a demented rhumba in act one, as a Vegas-style Frank Sinatra swing tune in act two.) The result on record may not be theatrical, exactly, but it certainly is affected. It also has the quality of an inside joke that listeners are not being let in on.

by William Ruhlmann, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Hang On St. Christopher
2. Straight To The Top (Rhumba)
3. Blow Wind Blow
4. Temptation
5. Innocent When You Dream (Barroom)
6. I'll Be Gone
7. Yesterday Is Here
8. Please Wake Me Up
9. Frank's Theme
10. More Than Rain
11. Way Down In The Hole
12. Straight To The Top (Vegas)
13. I'll Take New York
14. Telephone Call From Istanbul
15. Cold Cold Ground
16. Train Song
17. Innocent When You Dream ('78)

Big Time is an 18-track live album running nearly 68 minutes, its material drawn mostly from Tom Waits' trio of recent studio albums, Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Franks Wild Years. (One track, "Falling Down," is a previously unissued studio recording. The performance of "Strange Weather" marks Waits' first recording of a song he and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, wrote for Marianne Faithfull.) It's challenging music, made somewhat more accessible in a live context. Waits' performances tended to be somewhat over the top on the studio versions of these songs, but before a live audience his theatrics seem more appropriate, and he even includes a mini-set of piano ballads. Still, it takes him until the seventh tune, "Way Down in the Hole," to bring the audience to life, and he rarely speaks, in marked contrast to the earlier live-in-the-studio album Nighthawks at the Diner. But Big Time makes a useful sampler of Waits' later work that might enable a listener to determine whether to invest in the studio recordings.

by William Ruhlmann, AMG

Tracklist:

1. 16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six
2. Red Shoes
3. Underground
4. Cold Cold Ground
5. Straight To The Top
6. Yesterday Is Here
7. Way Down In The Hole
8. Falling Down
9. Strange Weather
10. Big Black Mariah
11. Rain Dogs
12.Train Song
13. Johnsburg, Illinois
14. Ruby's Arms
15. Telephone Call From Istanbul
16. Clap hands
17. Gun Street Girl
18. Time





Tracklist:

01 - Goin' Down Slow
02 - Poncho's Lament
03 - I'm Your Late Night Evening Prostitute
04 - Had Me A Girl
05 - Ice Cream Man
06 - Rockin' Chair
07 - Virginia Ave.
08 - Midnight Lullaby
09 - When You Ain't Got Nobody
10 - Little Trip To Heaven
11 - Frank's Song
12 - Look's Like I'm Up Shit Creek Again
13 - So Long I'll See Ya

Tom Waits brings an appropriately international flavor to his mostly instrumental score for Jim Jarmusch's globetrotting taxicab movie. As in all his music of the time, Waits' chief influence is Kurt Weill, and using horns and accordion among other instruments, he re-creates Weill's creepy, catchy style in 16 short tracks running almost 53 minutes. He and Kathleen Brennan contribute three songs with lyrics, which Waits performs in a calmer, more melodic way than those on some of his recent albums. Still, this soundtrack is very much in the style of Waits' Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Franks Wild Years albums.

by William Ruhlmann, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Back In The Good Old World (Gypsy)
2. Los Angeles Mood (Chromiun Descensions) instrumental
3. Los Angeles Theme (Another Private Dick) instrumental
4. New York theme (Hey You Can Have That Heartattack Outside Buddy) instrumental
5. New York Mood (A New Haircut And A Busted Lip) instrumental
6. Baby I'm Not A Baby Anymore (Beatrice Theme) instrumental
7. Good Old World (Waltz)
8. Carnival (Brunello Di Montalcino) instrumental
9. On The Other Side Of The World
10. Good Old World (Gypsy Instrumental)
11. Paris Mood (Un de Fromage) instrumental
12. Dragging A Dead Priest (instrumental)
13. Helsinki Mood (instrumental)
14. Carnival Bob's Confession (instrumental)
15. Good Old World (Waltz)
16. On The Other Side Of The World (instrumental)

Perhaps Tom Waits' most cohesive album, Bone Machine is a morbid, sinister nightmare, one that applied the quirks of his experimental '80s classics to stunningly evocative – and often harrowing – effect. In keeping with the title's grotesque image of the human body, Bone Machine is obsessed with decay and mortality, the ease with which earthly existence can be destroyed. The arrangements are accordingly stripped of all excess flesh; the very few, often non-traditional instruments float in distinct separation over the clanking junkyard percussion that dominates the record. It's a chilling, primal sound made all the more otherworldly (or, perhaps, underworldly) by Waits' raspy falsetto and often-distorted roars and growls. Matching that evocative power is Waits' songwriting, which is arguably the most consistently focused it's ever been. Rich in strange and extraordinarily vivid imagery, many of Waits' tales and musings are spun against an imposing backdrop of apocalyptic natural fury, underlining the insignificance of his subjects and their universally impending doom. Death is seen as freedom for the spirit, an escape from the dread and suffering of life in this world – which he paints as hellishly bleak, full of murder, suicide, and corruption. The chugging, oddly bouncy beats of the more uptempo numbers make them even more disturbing – there's a detached nonchalance beneath the horrific visions. Even the narrator of the catchy, playful "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" seems hopeless in this context, but that song paves the way for the closer "That Feel," an ode to the endurance of the human soul (with ultimate survivor Keith Richards on harmony vocals). The more upbeat ending hardly dispels the cloud of doom hanging over the rest of Bone Machine, but it does give the listener a gentler escape from that terrifying sonic world. All of it adds up to Waits' most affecting and powerful recording, even if it isn't his most accessible.

by Steve Huey, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Earth Died Screaming
2. Dirt In The Ground
3. Such A Scream
4. All Stripped Down
5. Who Are You
6. The Ocean Doesn't Want Me
7. Jesus Gonna Be Here
8. A Little Rain
9. In The Colosseum
10. Goin' Out West
11. Murder In The Red Barn
12. Black Wings
13. Whistle Down The Wind
14. I Don't Wanna Grow Up
15. Let Me Get Up On It (instrumental)
16. That Feel





Tracklist:

01 - Hope I Don't Fall Love With You
02 - Ol'55
03 - Mockin' Bird
04 - In Between Love
05 - Blue Skies
06 - Nobody
07 - I Want You
08 - Shiver Me Timbers
09 - Grapefruit Moon
10 - Diamonds On My Windshield
11 - Please Call Me, Baby
12 - So It Goes
13 - Old Shoes

Tom Waits collaborated with director Robert Wilson and librettist William Burroughs on the musical stage work The Black Rider in 1990. A variation on the Faust legend, the 19th century German story allowed Waits to indulge his affection for the music of Kurt Weill and address one of his favorite topics of recent years, the devil. Waits had proven an excellent collaborator when he worked with director Francis Ford Coppola on One from the Heart, making that score an integral part of the film. Here, the collaboration and the established story line served to focus Waits' often fragmented attention, lending coherence and consistency. He then had three years to adapt the score into a record album in which he did most of the singing and writing (though Burroughs contributed, singing one song and writing lyrics to three), and he used the time to come up with his best recording in a decade, a varied set of songs that work whether or not you know the show. (Seven of the 20 tracks were instrumentals.) Waits used the word "crude" to describe his working method several times in the liner notes, and a crude performing and recording style continued to appeal to him. But the kind of chaos that can sometimes result from that style was reined in by the bands he assembled in Germany and Los Angeles to record the score, so that the recordings were lively without being off-puttingly primitive.

by William Ruhlmann, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Lucky Day Overture
2. The Black Rider
3. November
4. Just The Right Bullets
5. Black Box Theme (instrumental)
6. T'Ain't No Sin
7. Flash Pan Hunter/ Intro (intrumental)
8. That's The Way
9. The Briar And The Rose
10. Russion Dance (instrumental)
11. Gospel Train/ Orchestra (instrumental)
12. I'll Shoot The Moon
13. Flash Pan Hunter
14. Crossroads
15. Gospel Train
16. Interlude (instrumental)
17. Oily Night
18. Lucky Day
19. The Last Rose Of Summer
20. Carnival (instrumental)





Tracklist:

1. Hang On St. Christopher
2. Temptation
3. Clap Hands
4. The Black Rider
5. Underground
6. Jockey Full Of Bourbon
7. Earth Died Screaming
8. Innocent When You Dream ('78)
9. Straight To The Top
10. Frank's Wild Years
11. Singapore
12. Shore Leave
13. Johnsburg, Illinois
14. Way Down In The Hole
15. Strange Weather (live)
16. Cold Cold Ground (live)
17. November
18. Downtown Train
19. 16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six
20. Jesus Gonna Be Here
21. Good Old World (Waltz)
22. I Don't Wanna Grow Up
23. Time

Tom Waits grew steadily less prolific after redefining himself as a junkyard noise poet with Swordfishtrombones, but the five-year wait between The Black Rider and 1999's Mule Variations was the longest yet. Given the fact that Waits decided to abandon major labels for the California indie Epitaph, Mule Variations would seem like a golden opportunity to redefine himself and begin a new phase of his career. However, it plays like a revue of highlights from every album he's made since Swordfishtrombones. Of course, that's hardly a criticism; the album uses the ragged cacophony of Bone Machine as a starting point, and proceeds to bring in the songwriterly aspects of Rain Dogs, along with its affection for backstreet and backwoods blues, plus a hint of the beatnik qualities of Swordfish. So Mule Variations delivers what fans want, in terms of both songs and sonics. But that also explains why it sounds terrific on initial spins, only to reveal itself as slightly dissatisfying with subsequent plays. All of Waits' Island records felt like fully conceived albums with genuine themes. Mule Variations, in contrast, is a collection of moments, and while each of those moments is very good (some even bordering on excellent), ultimately the whole doesn't equal the sum of its parts. While that may seem like nitpicking, some may have wanted a masterpiece after five years, and Mule Variations falls short of that mark. Nevertheless, this is a hell of a record by any other standard. Waits is still writing terrific songs and matching them with wildly evocative productions; furthermore, it's his lightest record in years – it's actually fun to listen to, even with a murder ballad here and a psycho blues there. In that sense, it's a unique item in his post-Swordfish catalog, and that may make up for it not being the masterpiece it seemed like it could have been.

by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Big In Japan
2. Lowside Of The Road
3. Hold On
4. Get Behind The Mule
5. House Where Nobody Lives
6. Cold Water
7. Pony
8. What's He Building
9. Black Market Baby
10. Eyeball Kid
11. Picture In A Frame
12. Chocolate Jesus
13. Georgia Lee
14. Filipino Box Spring Hog
15. Take It With Me
16. Come On Up To The House





Tracklist:

1. Heartattack And Vine
2. Eggs And Sausage (In A Cadillac With Susan Michelson)
3. A Sight For Sore Eyes
4. Whistlin' Past The Graveyard
5. Burma Shave
6. Step Right Up
7. Ol' '55
8. I Never Talk To Strangers
9. Mr. Siegal
10. Jersey Girl
11. Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis
12. Blue Valentines
13. (Looking For) The Heart Of Saturday Night
14. Muriel
15. Wrong Side Of The Road
16. Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets To The Wind In Copenhagen)

It's been long time since Tom Waits recorded an album as saturated with tenderness as this one. The carny-barker noise merchant who has immersed himself in brokenness and reportage from life's seamy, even hideous underbelly for decades has created, along with songwriting and life partner Kathleen Brennan, a love song cycle so moving and poetic that it's almost unbearable to take in one sitting. Alice is alleged to be the "great lost Waits masterpiece." Waits and Brennan collaborated with Robert Wilson on a stage production loosely based on Alice Liddell, the young girl who was the obsession and muse of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books. The show ran in Europe for a time and the production's 15 songs were left unrecorded until now. Alice forgoes the usual nightmare lyric sequences, warped, circus-like melodies, and sonic darknesses that have been part and parcel of Waits' work since Swordfishtrombones. Instead, this song cycle is, for the most part, steeped in jazz ballads, old waltzes, European folk songs, theatrical love paeans, and music not so easily identified. The instrumentation is different, with the utilization of a small chamber orchestra (the violins are Stroh violins, instruments outfitted with a metal horn on the end for amplification purposes), marimbas, piano, organ, woodwinds, and reeds, and the complete absence of guitars. The set opens with the title track, a smoky jazz ballad that may echo Waits' work from the 1970s, but is actually miles beyond it in scope. Here there is no purposely postured nuance or affectation of persona. The lyric is plaintive and full of pathos; it's almost a suicide note set to the most romantic melodic invention lounge jazz is capable of. As Waits sings, "The only strings that hold me here/Are tangled up around the pier/And so a secret kiss/Brings madness with the bliss/And I will think of this/When I'm dead and in my grave/Set me adrift/I'm lost over there/But I must be insane/To go on skating on your name/And by tracing it twice I fell through the ice/Of Alice/There's only Alice," the world turns inside out and the listener can no longer decide if this is a man or a ghost reporting from beneath the pond's surface. If love brings this, if obsession has such a cost, how can they be steeped in tenderness this transparent and plain? Elsewhere, Waits manages to delve into the voice of the turned-out lover, the rejected stone, the lost madman, as he does on "We're All Mad Here" and "Everything You Can Think." But even here there is a reflective dimension, nearly childlike in their simple embrace of loss, dispossession, and descent into the maelstrom of the human soul. Ghosts whisper in the mix, spirits float through the air, and demons passionately possess the protagonists. In the simpler, melting melodies of "Lost in the Harbour," "No One Knows I'm Gone," and the haunting tango at the heart of "Watch Her Disappear," obsession with the unmentionable (let alone the unattainable) is offered as an empathy for powerlessness, buoyed up by an instrumental crutch, arranged to give a voice to those who dare not speak publicly. The melodies on Alice are easily the most direct Waits has written since Blue Valentine, but are more elegant than even those found on Foreign Affairs or Black Rider. Alice is no step back, but a further step toward oblivion – the place where the sound of desolation, the melody of loneliness, and the confused darkness at the root of the human heart come together and speak as one in a nursery rhyme for adults.

by Thom Jurek, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Alice
2. Everything You Can Think
3. Flower's Grave
4. No One Knows I'm Gone
5. Kommienezuspadt
6. Poor Edward
7. Table Top Joe
8. Lost In The Harbour
9. We're All Mad Here
10. Watch Her Disappear
11. Reeperbahn12. I'm Still here
12. Fish & Bird
13. Barcarolle
14. Fawn (instrumental)

Tom Waits has said: "I like a beautiful song that tells you terrible things. We all like bad news out of a pretty mouth." When it comes to the material on Blood Money, I don't know if I can call Waits' mouth pretty, but he certainly offers plenty of bad news in a very attractive, compelling way. Released simultaneously with Alice, a recording of songs written in 1990, Blood Money is a set of 13 songs written by Waits and Kathleen Brennan in collaboration with dramatist Robert Wilson. The project was a loose adaptation of the play Woyzeck, originally written by German poet Georg Buchner in 1837. The play was inspired by the true story of a German soldier who was driven mad by bizarre army medical experiments and infidelity, which led him to murder his lover – cheery stuff, to be sure. Thematically, this work – with its references to German cabarets and nostalgia – echoes Waits' other Wilson collaborative project, Black Rider. Musically, however, Blood Money is a far more elegant, stylish, and nuanced work than the earlier recording. With bluesman Charlie Musselwhite, reedman Colin Stetson, bassist and guitarist Larry Taylor, marimbist Andrew Borger, and others – Waits plays piano, organ, marimba, calliope, and guitar – this is a theater piece that feels like a collection of songs that reflect a perverse sense of black humor and authentic wickedness in places. The protagonists of these songs are so warped and wasted by life that they are caricatures; it's impossible not to like them and to not be repulsed by yourself for doing so. For starters, the set opens with "Misery Is the River of the World," a circus-like tango wrapped around a series of dialectical aphorisms: "If there's one thing you can say about mankind/There's nothing kind about man." When a piano cascades up a minor scale in dramatic showmanship, Waits chants the refrain, "Misery is the river of the world," with seeming delight. On "God's Away on Business" (with guests Stewart Copeland on drums and PJ Harvey guitarist Joe Gore) the rhythm first displayed on Bone Machine resurfaces and fills out the backbeat. It's almost a march in its depth and dimension, giving the entire track the feeling of an evil seven dwarfs about to roast Snow White for dinner: "I'd sell your heart to the junkman, baby/For a buck, for a buck/If you're looking for someone to pull you out of that ditch/You're out of luck, out of luck." This is bleak, disturbing, and hysterically funny. It's not all snakes and alligators, however. In "Coney Island Baby," Waits delivers one of his most memorable and moving love songs while playing the chamberlain in front of the band, who plays an old-time waltz laced through with gorgeous cello and trumpet slipping ethereally through the mix. Waits croons without affectation or droopy sentiment: "Every night she comes/To take me out to dreamland/When I'm with her/I'm the richest man in the town/She's a rose/She's a pearl/She's the spin on my world/All the stars make wishes on her eyes." Likewise, the track that follows it, "All the World Is Green," is a paean of love from the soldier to his wife and "Another Man's Vine" boasts the most overtly sensuous use of the word "bougainvillea" in a pop song. In all, Blood Money, like its sister, Alice, is a record steeped in musical and lyrical traditions barely remembered by popular culture and hence very rarely evoked (from carnival marches to tarantellas, primitive tangos, and early 20th century jazz). This isn't the other side of Tin Pan Alley, but an appreciation for and evocation of the music of the Weimar Republic with its easy pathos and often grotesque funhouse humor. That said, this appreciation does not make for a re-creation; Waits' music is his own from this particular place in time, but it illustrates and illuminates particular kinds of human foibles from the present era and celebrates them as human nonetheless.

by Thom Jurek, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Misery Is The River Of The World
2. Everything Goes To Hell
3. Coney Island Baby
4. All The World Is Green
5. God's Away On Business
6. Another Man's Vine
7. Knife Chase (instrumental)
8. Lullaby
9. Starving In The Belly Of A Whale
10. The Part You Throw Away
11. Woe
12. Calliope (instrumental)
13. A Good Man Is Hard To Find

On Real Gone, Tom Waits walks a fraying tightrope. By utterly eliminating one of the cornerstone elements of his sound – keyboards – he has also removed his safety net. With songwriting and production partner Kathleen Brennan, he strips away almost everything conventional from these songs, taking them down to the essences of skeletal rhythms, blasted and guttural blues, razor-cut rural folk music, and the rusty-edge poetry and craft of songwriting itself. His cast includes guitarists Marc Ribot and Harry Cody, bassist/guitarist Larry Taylor, bassist Les Claypool, and percussionists Brain and Casey Waits (Tom's son), the latter of whom also doubles on turntables. This does present problems, such as on the confrontational opener, "Top of the Hill." Waits uses his growling, grunting vocal atop Ribot's monotonously funky single-line riff and Casey's turntables to become a human beatbox offering ridiculously nonsensical lyrics. It's a throwaway, and the album would have been better had it been left off entirely. But it's also a canard, a sleight-of-hand strategy he's employed before. The jewels shine from the mud immediately after. The mutated swamp tango of "Hoist That Rag" has stuttered clangs and quakes for drums, decorated by distorted Latin power chords and riffs from Ribot, along with thundering deep bass from Claypool. On the ten-plus minute "Sins of My Father," Cody's spooky banjo walks with Taylor's low-strung bass and Waits' shimmering reverbed guitar as he ominously croons, revealing a rigged game of "star-spangled glitter" where "justice wears suspenders and a powdered wig." It's part revelation, part East of Eden, and part backroom political culture framed by the eve of the apocalypse. It's hunted, hypnotic, and spooky.

In stripping away convention, Waits occasionally lets his songs go to extremes with absurd simplicity, such as on "Don't Go into That Barn," a musical cousin to his spoken "What's He Building?" from Mule Variations. But there's also the downright riotous squall of "Shake It," which sounds like an insane carny barker jamming with R.L. Burnside, or the riotous raging blues of "Baby Gonna Leave Me." There are "straight" narratives such as "How's It Gonna End," with its slow and brooding beat storyline, and the moving murder ballad "Dead and Lovely," with its drooping, shambolic elegance. There's the spoken word "Circus," with its wispy spindly frame that features Waits on chamberlain. And "Metropolitan Glide" feels like a hell-bent duet between James Brown and Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, followed by the fractured, busted-love, ranting-at-God pain that rips through "Make It Rain." The tender "Green Grass" is among Waits' finest broken love songs; it's movingly rendered by a character who could have resided in one of William Kennedy's novels. The set closes with "Day After Tomorrow," featured on MoveOn.org's Future Soundtrack for America. It is one of the most insightful and understated antiwar songs to have been written in decades. It contains not a hint of banality or sentiment in its folksy articulation. Real Gone is another provocative moment for Waits, one that has problems, but then, all his records do. His excesses, however, do nothing to cloud the stellar achievements of his risk-taking vision and often brilliant execution.

by Thom Jurek, AMG

Tracklist:

1. Top Of The Hill
2. Hoist That Rag
3. Sins Of The Father
4. Shake It
5. Don't Go Into That Barn
6. How's It Gonna End
7. Metropolitan Glide
8. Dead And Lovely
9. Circus
10. Trampled Rose
11. Green Grass
12. Baby Gonna Leave Me
13. Clang Boom Steam
14. Make It Rain
15. Day After Tomorrow
16. Chickaboom (hidden track)

At this stage of the game, any new Tom Waits record is an event. Listening through the music of his entire career is daunting, to say the least, but it's a journey no one else, with the possible exception of Bob Dylan, has taken before. If one listens to the official recordings, from 1973's Closing Time, featuring the songs of an itinerant Beat barroom singer (no lounges please), right on through to the frenetic mania of 2004's Real Gone, one becomes aware of not only the twists and turns of a songwriter wrestling and bellowing at and with his muse, but of a journeyman artist barely able to hold on to the lid of his creativity, let alone keep it on. True, there have been many stops along the way: in the seediest lounges (1977's Foreign Affairs, which could have been a twisted inspiration to novelist Phillip Kerr when he wrote the Berlin Noir trilogy); acid-drenched blues scree (1980's Heartattack and Vine); travelogues of the unseen and the unspeakable (1985's Rain Dogs); seething and murderous suburban nightmares (1987's Franks Wild Years); the frighteningly comic tales of plagues and carnivals (1993's Black Rider); the scrape, squeal, and hollowed-out metal crunch of urban junkyards and classically American paranoia (1999's Mule Variations); and through-the-mirror-darkly image nightmares and fairy tale variations (2002's Alice and Blood Money). All of it is contained in the man who takes delight in the bent, quarreling marriage of song and sound with dangerously comic imagery.

Orphans is the most unwieldy Tom Waits collection yet. Packaged in a Cibachrome-tinted box are three discs containing 56 songs total. It claims 30 new tunes, but a mere 14 can be found on other records – six othersd have to be hunted for while the remainder have shown up in various incarnationson soundtracks, compilations, etc. This crazy thing began as a collection of outtakes, rarities, soundtrack tunes, and compilation-only cuts – some of which survive here in new form, including tracks from the Ramblin' Jack Elliot tribute, the Bridge benefit, and two Ramones covers, to name a few. In other words, the first conception for this mess was as a hodgepodge collection of attic material. Waits checked out the tune selection as it was and said something like "nah, bad idea; this would suck." So, he did what any self-respecting artist with a head full of ideas, two stomping, shuffling feet, and itchy fingers – and time on his hands – would do: he recorded new songs and re-recorded others, so the thing would have some kind of elasticity yet hold its rickety bone and far-reaching sources together by means of cheap glue, chewed gum, solder, and a visionary recording engineer named Karl Derfler.

The end result is this daunting triple disc divided by title and theme: disc one is "Brawlers," Waits' rock and blues record, evoking everyone from T. Rex and Johnny Burnette to Sonny Curtis and Howlin' Wolf. It's a grand thing, since he hasn't released one like this before – the closest were Heartattack and Vine on one side and Mule Variations on the other. Travel, regret, murder, salvation, guttersnipe meditations on sorrow, and nefarious and broken-down innocent – and nefarious – amorous intentions are a few of the themes that run through these tunes like oil and sand. Disc two is "Bawlers," a collection of ballads, raw love songs, weepy wine tunes, wistful yet tentative hope – in the form of floppy prayers – and an under-the-table and wishing, bewildered, yet dead-on topical tome on the world's political situation. Disc three, entitled "Bastards," is even edgier; it's Waits hanging out there with his music and muse on the lunatic fringe of experimentation. Think Bone Machine's wilder moments and Waits' loopy standup comedy in the form of six spoken word pieces included here. Thank goodness he finally did this. If you've ever seen the man on a stage, you'll get why these are so important immediately.

"Brawler" digs deep into the American roots music that has obsessed Waits since the beginning of his long labyrinthine haul. There's the frenetic rockabilly swagger that probably makes Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent shake and shimmy in their graves. One of the movie tunes, a cover of "Sea of Love," recalls its place in the film for those who've seen it. If you haven't, it's a slanted, tarnished jewel freshly liberated from antiquity. The hobo ballad "Bottom of the World" recalls old country gospel, and "Lucinda" can only be described as a gallows dance tune. The slippery hoodoo blues "Road to Peace" is the season's most timely and topical political song.

"Bawlers" is the set's bridge, and it's easy to see why: it's the most accessible disc in the box. There are some of the movie tunes here, from flicks like Pollock, Big Bad Love, and Shrek 2. Other cuts, such as "Goodnight Irene," recall "Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)" from the Small Change album; the singing protagonist here is older and more desperate, almost suicidal. Resignation displaces hope; it's a long reach into the past and expresses the void of the present. The cover of the Ramones' "Danny Says" is completely reinvented; it's one of the loneliest, most sweetly desolate of Waits' many sides. It's not all darkness, however; there are gorgeous songs here too, such as "Never Let Go" and "You Can Never Hold Back Spring," where an indomitable human spirit reins and rings true.

Finally, it comes down to "Bastards." The eerie, strange, cabaret-in-a-carnival music that is Weill and Brecht's "What Keeps Mankind Alive" enlists banjos, accordion, tuba, and big bass drum as simply the means to let these twisted words out of the box. Thankfully the cover of "Books of Moses," originally by Skip Spence, is here, as is Daniel Johnston's "King Kong." Neither of these cuts resembles their original version, and Waits brings out the dark underbelly inherent in each. "Bedtime Story" is the first of the Waits monologues here. It is the repressed wish of every parent (with a sense of humor) to have the temerity to tell this kind of tale to their children when they retire. Others include a reading of Charles Bukowski's "Nirvana," the hilarious monologue "The Pontiac," and the live routine "Dog Door." Perhaps the most inviting cut here is the piano-and-horn ballad "Altar Boy," a postmodern saloon song that would make Bobby Short turn red with rage. This disc is the true mixed bag in the set: unruly, uneven, and full of feints and free-for-alls.

Ultimately, the epicenter of Orphans is Waits' voice. It's many expressions, nuances, bellows, barks, hollers, open wails, roughshod croons, and midnight whispers carry these songs and monologues to the listener with authority as an open invitation into his sound world, his view of tradition, and his manner of shaping that world as something not ephemeral, but as an extension of musical time itself. As a vocalist, Waits, like Bob Dylan, embodies the entire genealogical line of the blues, jazz, local barroom bards, and traveling minstrels in the very grain of his songs. That wily throat carries not only the songs he and his songwriting partner and wife, Kathleen Brennan, pen, but also the magnet for the sonic atmospheres that frame it. There is adventure, danger, and the sound of the previous, the forgotten, and the wished for in it. And it is that voice that links all three of these discs together and makes them partners. One cannot dismiss that even though some of these songs have appeared elsewhere, Orphans is a major work that goes beyond the origins of the material and drags everything past and present with sound and texture into a present to be presented as something utterly new, beyond anything he has previously issued. To paraphrase Ezra Pound in response to Allen Ginsberg's inquiry about what his poem "The Cantos" meant, these orphans speak for themselves.

by Thom Jurek, AMG

Tracklist CD1 - Brawlers:

01. Lie To Me
02. LowDown
03. 2:19
04. Fish In The Jailhouse
05. Bottom Of The World
06. Lucinda
07. Ain't Goin' Down To The Well
08. Lord I've Been Changed
09. Puttin' On The Dog
10. Road To Peace
11. All The Time
12. The Return Of Jackie and Judy
13. Walk Away
14. Sea Of Love
15. Buzz Fledderjohn
16. Rains On Me


Tracklist CD2 - Bawlers:

01. Bend Down The Branches
02. You Can Never Hold Back Spring
03. Long Way Home
04. Widow's Grove
05. Little Drop Of Poison
06. Shiny Things
07. World Keeps Turning
08. Tell It To Me
09. Never Let Go
10. Fannin Street
11. Little Man
12. It's Over
13. If I Have To Go
14. Goodnight Irene
15. The Fall Of Troy
16. Take Care Of All My Children
17. Down There By The Train
18. Danny Says
19. Jayne's Blue Wish
20. Young At Heart.


Tracklist CD3 - Bastards:

01. What Keeps Mankind Alive
02. Children's Story
03. Heigh Ho
04. Army Ants
05. Books Of Moses
06. Bone Chain (free form singing)
07. Two Sisters
08. First Kiss
09. Dog Door
10. Redrum (instrumental)
11. Nirvana
12. Home I'll Never Be
13. Poor Little Lamb
14. Altar Boy
15. The Pontiac
16. Spidey's Wild Ride
17. King Kong
18. On The Road

Tom Waits’ Glitter and Doom Live doesn't fall into the various traps that many other concert recordings do, though it does have its problems. This double-disc set marks his third live effort in his nearly 40-year career, each one summing up his career to the point of its release. The first, Nighthawks at the Diner, issued in 1975 on Asylum, is regarded by many as one of the greatest live albums of all time. Big Time, released during his tenure at Island in 1986, is hotly debated in fan circles. It is likely that Glitter and Doom Live will be too, but for different reasons. The musical performances here were culled from Waits’ historic sold-out tour of the U.S. and Europe. He compiled and sequenced the tracks himself, intending to make them sound like a single show. The material leans, understandably, on his recordings with the Anti label. There are stellar performances here, of “Get Behind the Mule” from The Mule Variations, “Trampled Rose” from Real Gone, and a haunting version of Leadbelly’s “Fannin Street” from Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, to mention just three of the 17 cuts included on disc one. But he also goes back to his Island albums with a new approach to the material. For instance, there are completely re-visioned readings of “Lucky Day” and “I’ll Shoot the Moon” from 1993’s Black Rider, and a killer – though equally revamped – version of “Singapore” from 1985’s Rain Dogs.

Musically, the performances are flawless, as is the sound on this set. The killer stage band includes Vincent Henry on woodwinds and harmonica, guitarist Omar Torres, Patrick Warren on piano and keyboards, Casey Waits on drums/percussion, and Seth Ford Young on bass. There is also a guest appearance by Sullivan Waits on sax and clarinet; Tom plays piano and guitar. Waits decided to ax most of the stage banter from disc one. This is problematic because it is as much part and parcel of his show as the music is. Without it, the music as a whole feels more like just a random but solid collection of live tracks, rather than Waits' intended purpose of a single-show experience. The other problem is disc two, a bonus in this deluxe package comprised of a single 35-plus-minute track called "Tom's Tales," which splices stories and dialogue, reminiscences and spontaneous comedy. These routines work brilliantly and seamlessly in the context of his show. If one goes back to Nighthawks at the Diner or Big Time, evidence is ample. Without a song coming after these wildly various ruminations, they feel strangely disembodied and one can only hear it once or twice before the material itself feels old. Conversely, then, the musical disc feels incomplete, too. This one gets its grade strictly on the quality of the music. While the wide-spine digipack is beautiful, the project as a whole falls short, though some hardcore Waits fans will, as is customary, ardently disagree.

by Thom Jurek, AMG

Tracklist CD1:

01. Lucinda / Ain’ Goin’ Down To The Well No Mo’
02. Singapore
03. Get Behind The Mule
04. Fannin Street
05. Dirt In The Ground
06. Such A Scream
07. Live Circus
08. Goin' Out West
09. Falling Down
10. The Part You Throw Away
11. Trampled Rose
12. Metropolitan Glide
13. I'll Shoot The Moon
14. Green Grass
15. Make It Rain
16. Story
17. Lucky Day


Tracklist CD2:

01. Tom Tales



All thanks go to the original releasers