Tom Waits

You guys are right about Nirvana upthread. It's been on every Christmas compilation I've made since I first heard it.

The poem about the boy waiting at a diner during a bus ride stopover is particularly great.
yeah! almost wish there was a whole album of this sort of thing. he has an amazing speaking voice, even when he's not hamming it up.

I made a compilation of many of his best spoken word pieces, stuff like "What's he building in there". A bit disjointed in feel but it captures that incredible side of his work. I wish I flat-out loved his singing but I just don't.

U know the drill

yeah it's funny how much this is exactly what you expect a new tom waits song is going to sound like, but, you know, nice also. spoken bits are v wolf.

am i totally reactionary if i prefer his pre-swordfishtrombones stuff?

nope, otm.

it's like loving the complex human sprawl of a man but remembering the innocence of the child he was

thanks, i feel validated!

you're all wrong.

Nah, I'm kidding - you can like what you like, you don't have to ask me!

There is something quite devastating and melancholy and genuine about a lot of early Waits. Albums like Small Change are gut-wrenchingly desperate while Heart Of Saturday Night is so wistful and starry-eyed. I have a lot of time for this era. He had a tendency to go from genuinely affecting to full-on hammy, but by reinventing himself in the early '80s he managed to hit a happy medium through pure theatre.

I love that cartoon "The Street Tom Waits Grew Up On" upthread. Who did that?

So, the new album is out. Ilxors?

Was listening to Rain Dogs yesterday and I think that was definitely his peak. Franks Wild Years and Bone Machine and Mule Variations all have a couple of good songs, but it's been diminishing returns since '85.

I like "Hell Broke Luce" because I'm feeling sympathetic to his groanin' and moanin' this week but so far the album sounds like it won't convert any skeptics.

the kinda auto herk-&-jerks didn't grab me when i streamed this one time, but a bunch of the others did. it's weird how his records somehow sound very 'tidy', in spite of the unruliness therein, like maybe they're put together a little too neatly. he has some great players. guitars are lovely, a beautiful fiddle came in halfway through a song.

Hell Broke Luce is amazing - ultraviolent shellshock crunk-metal.

Still can't get behind the Mule Variations. A few good songs, but loads of slow, repetitive clunkers - those first four tracks are a real hurdle.
(I really like this new album on the whole).

Maybe two tracks aside, I think Mule Variations is pretty unfuckwithable!

Gimme the ballads and "What's He Building?" and you can have the rest. But the ballads are amazing.

it's weird how his records somehow sound very 'tidy', in spite of the unruliness therein, like maybe they're put together a little too neatly. he has some great players. guitars are lovely, a beautiful fiddle came in halfway through a song.

― mid-song laughing elvis (schlump), Friday, October 21, 2011 8:51 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i was listening to bone machine and i remember thinking it was so "weird" when i was younger but he's really a classic songwriter type

but he is ultra-violent shellshock crunk-metal do u see

i find tom waits ultra classical-definition Pretentious i.e. a lot of to-do about not much. i like some of his ballads because i like ballads and his sad clown is more palatable to me than his grotesque clown.

yeah i was listening to bone machine and i remember thinking it was so "weird" when i was younger but he's really a classic songwriter type

i think that's true, and that there's a lot of interesting ways in which his weirdness reinforce his normalness (like i remember hearing that he wrote a lot of real gone on a drum, & you can kinda see how that might encourage the kind of very straightforward melodies that you are limited to if your palette is a drum and singing, making the record v melodic if in a roundabout way). i was really talking about his production though; i think i wish that he was recorded kinda 'off mic' so you got more of an idea of the sound and scale of his voice than the kind of very literal and throaty recording of how bluesy and fucked it is.

+ lol @ sad clown

BM was my first Waits album too, and it took a few listens to ballads like "Who Are You" and "Whistle Down the Wind" that the guy has a sentimental streak a county wide.

*to realize that

Amazing to have that ever being in doubt, having started with Waits with FRANK'S WILD YEARS and giving everything before that a listen before long after.

Goes all the way back to "Grapefruit Moon."

yeah, the dude is sort of a walking sentimental streak. i think he makes it work though.

First album is mostly sentimental ballads, no? "Martha" etc

the new one is really good! kinda surprised i thought he'd jumped the shark and tipped into self-parody on real gone

LOVE the recession ballad in his falsetto (!)

lex you liking tom waits is quite incomprehensible to me.

I mean, I believe you obv, but I'm a bit shaken too.

yeah that is surprising. i had to read that twice.

It's a shame he tours so infrequently, since in many ways live presents him in the best light. The "Mule Variations" comeback jaunt was memorable awesome, and the "Real Gone" tour was tons of fun, too. The guy's theatricality is made for an audience.

i've always loved tom waits, i thought this was common knowledge

ranking the albums i've heard, not inc the new one

rain dogs > blue valentine > closing time > mule variations > alice > swordfishtrombones > blood money > heartattack and vine > real gone

absolutely adore the first three espesh

Ooh crumbs the Lex, if you like those, you must seek out Franks Wild Years, Small Change and Heart Of Saturday Night. I find Blue Valentine and Closing Time just a little too hammy. Mule Variations is a bit boring in places.

I love this Jon Pareles interview with him in the NY Times. Waits in his Suburban SUV drives Pareles onto railroad tracks and near a defunct truck stop...Plenty of informative and entertaining Waits quotes

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/arts/music/tom-waitss-new-album-bad-as-me.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

His songs and arrangements often smack of bleary late nights. But he prefers to record, surprisingly, first thing in the morning. “I used to think that great albums were made at 3 in the morning, until I tried recording at 3 in the morning. And then it was like: ‘Oh, man, I missed it. I’m out of gas,’ ” he said. “At 9:30, 10 o’clock, no one’s heard anything yet, they’re clean. Most of ’em haven’t even had breakfast yet, so this is breakfast.”

He offers his sidemen suggestions: “ ‘I want you to play like you’re 7 years old at a recital. I want you to play like your mom’s in the room. I want you to play like you’re miles from home, and your legs are dangling from a boxcar. Or play like your hair’s on fire. Play like you have no pants on.’ ”

....

Mr. Waits’s black Suburban was cluttered. On the passenger seat was a yellowing newspaper announcing the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. A large bottle of Valencia Mexican hot sauce rolled on the floor. Atop a pile covering the back seat were a bowler hat and a glittery sequined jacket. “I have the pants to match,” he said.

Under the clothing were LPs akin to Mr. Waits’s own music: Captain Beefheart, Willy DeVille and an album by the blues harmonica virtuoso Charlie Musselwhite, who also plays on the album. Digging further, Mr. Waits came up with an old sarsaparilla bottle, discovered, he said, while scavenging the truck stop’s parking lot.

waits really is just a bottomless well of great interview quotes. he doesn't even repeat himself very much!

i loved this-

"Anyone who has ever played a piano would really like to hear how it sounds when dropped from a 12th-floor window."

loved this from the ny times interview (and meyers does sound awesome on the album)

Q.
Another one of the sidemen on this album is Augie Meyers, the keyboard and accordion player who defined Tex-Mex with the Sir Douglas Quintet.

A.
He responds well to suggestions but he doesn’t do anything you ask him to do. He did some organ stabs on “Raised Right Man.” I was trying to tell him where to put them. And he was looking at me, like, don’t tell me where to put the stabs, man. I could stab this myself. I’m the stab king. I’ve been stabbing since before you were born.

:P

listening to this on the npr stream for the first time. sounds great, though i'm not sure if there's anything on here he hasn't done before. shorter song lengths are a good idea!
cool that keef richards is all over it. waits should produce a richards solo album!

My teenage son was all what's with that guy's scratchy voice.

It's Tom Waits's "Wild Honey" IMO. Fun album, shorter songs.

friggin love "Chicago".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5X4N2exOsU

omg. you're outta luck *smooch*

omg "Hell Broke Luce" = "Mutiny In Heaven"

Still the best song on the album though.

While I was listening to this I thought, hmm, I wonder if Tom Waits will ever do a Tom Waits Songbook, wherein he remakes favorite songs from his catalog. And then it hits me that, well, that's basically what he's been doing as of late. This is still a fun album, and has a spark that "Real Gone" didn't quite have. Or maybe it did; my listening of that one got eclipsed by "Orphans."

The soundtrack to Night On Earth (lots of cool junkyard instrumentals) isn't part of this reissue program, either...too bad.

Thrilled to be able to get Black Rider on vinyl finally! It might be my fave of his.

i've got a couple of these on LP (Rain Dogs and FWY) but really psyched for Bone Machine, which was the first Waits i ever heard.

I think about this Tom Waits story all the time. pic.twitter.com/njGUWEsdx4

— Christopher Smets (@CWSmets) July 7, 2023

hahaha

The download version of the new Swordfishtrombones remaster sounds great. NO compression either, surprisingly, which bodes well for the physical release.

Or rather no ADDITIONAL compression, at least none that's egregious.

I was listening to Rain Dogs on Tidal earlier and yeah, they sound great. No brickwalling, just more clarity and fullness (which brings sounds to the fore that I hadn't noticed before, though TBF I started listening to that album on cassette).

Waits is about the one guy whose records didn't sound shitty in the 80s, so good to see they're continuing with this idea.

he hasn't messed it up like they did real gone then?

completely pivotal albums for me in college in the early 90's, glad to see these coming since vinyl copies used are priced through the roof and my CDs are long gone.

I had bone machine and black rider on either sides of a tape in college, wore that shit out