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 lues 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' ock and lues 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 allads, 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 oots music that has obsessed Waits since the beginning of his long labyrinthine haul. There's the frenetic ockabilly 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 allad "Bottom of the World" recalls old country gospel, and "Lucinda" can only be described as a gallows dance tune. The slippery hoodoo lues "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 allad "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 lues, 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.
Top Five Spoken (or mostly spoken) Word Songs1. _Tom Waits--Nirvana_ This song reminds me a lot of Jack Kerouac. It's amazing how similar Tom Waits is to the beat generation, and that whole raw, stream of consciousness style.2. _William Shatner--Together_ It was so hard to pick just one song from the Shat....but this takes the cake.3. _Eels--Susan's House_ I'm fairly new to...
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I've been on a real Tom Waits buzz of late and all of it is done to just one song. Road to Peace, a song about the Israel-Palestine conflict. I know it might be wrong, but I think it is possibly the grooviest song EVER! If you ignore the lyrics of course. It seems to be coming on a lot in my random, and I can't help but getting into it. Damn its goooood! The lyrics only add to the fact that its...
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I know we have a plethora of Tom Waits fans around hear. Not sure if anyone has posted their thoughts on Orphans. I've been listening to it sporatically for the last week or so..... A couple songs jumped out after first listen. "Sea of Love" kinda reminds me of the "HeartAttack and Vine" album. Sounds like three different tracks rolled into one. Same sounding production as well. "Long Way Home...
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It amazes me quite often just how versatile a musician Tom Waits is, and I feel one area where he doesn't get enough credit is his writing of political songs. Green Day got all the props for their political rock with American Idiot, but meanwhile, one song on Real Gone, "The Day After Tomorrow," pretty much trumped every other anti-war song from 204. I just relistened to Orphans, and was remind...
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Orphans stuns grinds and halts. And i mean that in a good way. It thankfully eases my guilt by including all of the "imports" that i had received over the years from various sources, and pours them into this dusty old box set. That, along with the gems that haven't been heard by anyone at all, meaning mainly myself, all hold water. Lots of it. Now they bathe and finally breath after so many man...
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I just dwnlded Orphans from iTunes and I'm lovin' it,Good description/review from Amazon; without a bit of background you might not know what's going on here, (besides of course the great music coming from this man and his machine) -Amazon.com"...The title, Orphans, refers to the songs either being from a range of outside projects, various impulses, and whims, or simply not having found a place on
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Anybody out there who is the music business, a part of the RIAA or just know's what's up? I have a simple question - If I pay $10-$20 for a cd or digital album. How much of that exact amount goes to the artist?Leave out the the extended explanations, just give me a straight answer.Thanks,A concerned MOG'r
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Check out this video for Waits' new bluesy romp, "Lie To Me." I love the stop action and simplicity of this video. Plus, it looks like Tom was having a blast crashing around the studio like that. Welcome back pal.
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"Tom Waits":http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1932046,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1 on songwriting:'Some day I'm gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it. Kinda like a time capsule. Or making a voodoo doll. You gotta wrap it with thread, put a rock inside the head, then use two st...
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In the few years I've been writing for this website, my love of musicians who look/sound like olde-tyme drifters has been well-documented. If an artist sings about hard-livin' and seems like they could've spent several years traveling with the circus through the backroads of Depression-era America, I'm into it. So you can imagine my delight when I heard about this new limited-edition vinyl rele...
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What the hell was I thinking? Why didn't I post this on the first day of spring. I know that some of you are soaking up the sun........but spring has just recently made it to my part of the world. Turn it up......look out the window.........take the ipod for a walk. Stop your engines.........get out and shake some hands.....exchange hugs............get naked like the guy in Germany!!!!!!!Tom Wa...
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Probably not a good idea! I reiterate, *for the love of Jebus, keep Tom Waits away from your chil’ren.*....also, "NO BEDTIME STORIES!!!!":http://mog.com/jameson/blog_post/61647
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I just dwnlded Orphans from iTunes and I'm lovin' it,Good description/review from Amazon; without a bit of background you might not know what's going on here, (besides of course the great music coming from this man and his machine) -Amazon.com"...The title, Orphans, refers to the songs either being from a range of outside projects, various impulses, and whims, or simply not having found a place on
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If you haven't heard the latest three disc release by Tom Waits, I am telling you, you are really missing out on a musical adventure. It is so wonderful. I am listening to the song Shiny Things on repeat right now and it nearly has me in tears. The song paints an aural landscape of a lone park in the middle of blues town. Heads hang low as the sky has no mystery anymore. Will someone throw this...
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Give a listen to this very excellent song off Tom Waits' latest album, Orphans.
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I know we have a plethora of Tom Waits fans around hear. Not sure if anyone has posted their thoughts on Orphans. I've been listening to it sporatically for the last week or so..... A couple songs jumped out after first listen. "Sea of Love" kinda reminds me of the "HeartAttack and Vine" album. Sounds like three different tracks rolled into one. Same sounding production as well. "Long Way Home...
More >
Hey- I just saw this on "NME":http://www.nme.com/news/tom-waits/24510.Anti- will be posting mp3s from each disc of the new Waits album "here":http://www.anti.com/news.php?id=210. Currently, it's "Bottom of The World":http://www.anti.com/news.php?id=210.According to NME (and I do recommend you check the article out:), the tracks for download will include some of the covers. FYI they also say ...
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Anybody out there who is the music business, a part of the RIAA or just know's what's up? I have a simple question - If I pay $10-$20 for a cd or digital album. How much of that exact amount goes to the artist?Leave out the the extended explanations, just give me a straight answer.Thanks,A concerned MOG'r
More >
"Tom Waits":http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1932046,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1 on songwriting:'Some day I'm gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it. Kinda like a time capsule. Or making a voodoo doll. You gotta wrap it with thread, put a rock inside the head, then use two st...
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a couple of things1. love the dog just chillin2. how old is Waits? the man can move!3. wonder who shot this?i was originally drawn in by this video for "lie to me". i hadn't heard it and loved the catchy rock-a-billy beat. thought the way it was shot was just so damn cool, to match the beats of the song with the progression of the photo frames is just, well, fucking hot, there i've said it. ...
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Top Five Spoken (or mostly spoken) Word Songs1. _Tom Waits--Nirvana_ This song reminds me a lot of Jack Kerouac. It's amazing how similar Tom Waits is to the beat generation, and that whole raw, stream of consciousness style.2. _William Shatner--Together_ It was so hard to pick just one song from the Shat....but this takes the cake.3. _Eels--Susan's House_ I'm fairly new to...
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 "Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards")
