Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (Remastered)
by Tom Waits
This album has been added to 2 public lists:
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Tom Waits
Tom said that this album was “A lot of songs that fell behind the stove while making dinner, about 60 tunes that we collected”. It’s split into three parts - Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, or to put it another way, rock songs, sad songs and weird stuff.
There are already surprises, right from the very first track with Tom doing a very creditable impression of Elvis followed a bit later by an excellent Ramones cover.
My favourite song from this disc is Road to Peace, which is an anti-war song about Israel-Palestine and depressingly still as relevant today.
Bawlers has some great ballads and slow numbers, but there are surprises including a gospel number called Down There By The Train that Tom originally wrote for Johnny Cash and a moving song called Little Man which sounds like it was written for his son.
Bastards is as weird as you could wish for with some surreal spoken word pieces about army ants and King Kong, and a version of Heigh-Ho from Disney’s Snow White that I did not recognise at first hearing! The album finishes with another live track and an odd anecdote about being mistaken for someone’s dead son (who looks nothing like the narrator) and has a great twist.
In conclusion, this is a great collection of the range and ambition of Tom Waits’ music over time.
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Later in life by music legends
there aren’t a lot of triple albums out there but this is up there in the top 5
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