Tom Waits

This is seventeenth (and last to date) studio album from Tom, from 2011 although he has been working on remasters last year as well as touring and releasing live albums.

This still sounds fresh and innovative as ever, while still calling back to earlier albums. It doesn’t feel like a final record to me, at least until the last line of the last song when Tom asks “What is it like? What is it like after we die?”

I think that he may well surprise us again one of these days!

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.

Album 16, and this one opens with Tom beatboxing, record scratching and getting funky in places. From anyone else of this vintage, this might be a bit embarrassing, but Tom pulls it off with considerable panache. The lyrics are particularly powerful on this album, especially the truly shocking back story to Don’t Go Into the Barn and the anti war Day After Tomorrow. Powerful stuff.

When asked why this soundtrack for the play Woyzeck was released at the same time as Alice, Tom said “if you're gonna heat up the stove, there's no point in making just one pancake, right?”. Makes perfect sense to me! This is another great collection of songs and mood pieces, with the haunting and discordant Calliope being particularly memorable. More great live songs too - I’m looking at the live albums for a listen now!

Soundtrack time again, with this one being a play about Lewis Caroll’s obsession with the young Alice Liddell. As might be expected we are seriously into the surreal and weird here, bordering on disturbing in places. Tom also finds another new instrument to play with - the Stroh Violin which is well worth googling a picture of. The special edition of this has some great live versions of some of the tracks too!

We are thirteen albums in now and there are still surprises to be found. The opening track Big in Japan is a real blast with huge drums and a harshly distorted voice, followed by the weirdness of Lowside of the Road and the gorgeous Hold On. The highlight of side two is the on the nose (and hilarious) Chocolate Jesus - sacrilicious! The album closes with a return to classic Tom Waits gravelly vocals on Come On Up to the House.

This is another soundtrack for a play, this one being written by the legendary William S Burroughs, based on a German folk tale. This opens with Waits playing the role of a demonic carnival barker inviting us to view a gruesome freak show, featuring Hitler’s Brain amongst other exhibits! Listen out for another unusual instrument which I don’t think we’ve heard before - the bowed saw on November. An album of contrasting moods and imagery.

This album was recorded in a bare cellar with a cement floor, giving it a raw, immediate quality. This was also the first time that Tom played percussion on any of his records - he said “I like to play drums when I'm angry … Drumming is therapeutic. I wish I'd found it when I was younger”. This gives yet another evolution of his sound, especially on the sparse “All Stripped Down” as well as the western style intro to “Goin’ Out West”

This album concludes the trilogy that started with Swordfishtrombones and includes songs that were written for a play, forming a narrative arc. If you’ve been paying attention to the usual fate that befalls the protagonist in a Tom Waits song, then it will be no surprise that a road trip to Vegas, booze and an appointment with the devil are on the cards. Highlight is Way Down in the Hole, which was used as the theme song for The Wire.

The title track refers to those dogs who are lost and confused after a storm because all of their familiar scents have been washed away. The opening of this album is a little like that, with the first couple of tracks feeling a little bit more restrained and downbeat, making this album a slow burn. However it swiftly picks up, with Rain Dogs on side 2 being a standout for me.

This album was hailed as a radical departure at the time, but after the last couple of days it’s clear it’s more of an evolution, developing Tom’s established themes and distinctive style, and featuring instruments including a harmonium, marimba, bagpipes, a glass harmonica and even a chair. It’s an amazing album that still holds surprises even after many listens, particularly on the 2023 remaster. Each of the songs sets a distinctive mood and tells a story - from a drunken sailor on shore leave to a dusty town with no booze, with the standout being Frank’s Wild Years with the narrator telling a horrific tale of casual murder and mental breakdown in suburbia, sounding as if he’s chatting in a bar about the weather. The vocals range from the sweetly romantic on Johnsburg, Illinois to a wild drunken howl, and the lyrics go from a straightforward narrative to the barkingly surreal. Interspersed with the stories are instrumental pieces that are spine tingling.

A true masterpiece.

This album continues a theme I’ve spotted of the title tracks being particularly good. In this case, this one is first on the album and sets out the theme and mood with a slow blues riff, and also anticipates the album that follows this one. There are also experiments with some different styles here, notable Jersey Girl which could have been a Bruce Springsteen song.

This album opens with a simply heart breaking cover of Somewhere from West Side Story with Tom sounding remarkably like Louis Armstrong. After that, we are back in noir story telling with the evocative Red Shoes and Romeo Lies Bleeding. I think that this album might also be the first appearance of Tom’s distinctive drunk howl.

This is the soundtrack to the greatest noir detective movie that never was. It’s heavy on the sax and conjures a black and white world of beat poets and drifters. My favourite Tom Waits song is Burma Shave which is about the billboards on American highways in the 50s that advertised shaving cream but looked like signposts to a mythical town. This album also features the legendary Bette Middler singing a duet with Tom on one track.

This is a poignant listen for a dark Sunday night. This was the album where Tom went a bit method in his song writing - he’d buy a pint of rye in a brown bag and go and drink it down on skid row. He described the opening track ‘Waltzing Matilda’ as being about the experience of ‘throwing up in a foreign country’. Unsurprisingly, alcohol (and alcoholism) is a major theme and drawn from his personal experiences.

This is unusual - it’s a studio album, but it was actually recorded live with a small audience giving the feel of being in an intimate jazz club somewhere, surrounded by a blue haze of cigarette smoke and the sounds of a crowd enjoying a martini or two. More like trad jazz than the first two albums with a distinctive thrum of an upright bass setting the tempo. Interesting choice of title, evoking the iconic Hopper painting of a late night diner.

Somewhat more sentimental than the first album, but taking an interesting diversion into a sort of beat poetry on the track The Ghosts of Saturday Night with such memorable and evocative lines as :

‘As he dreams of a waitress with Maxwell House Eyes And marmalade thighs’

I can’t help but be immediately transported to a down at heel pizza parlor or a run down Texaco station in a two bit town in the middle of nowhere.

I came to Tom Waits via his break through album Swordfishtrombones, known for his gravelly voiced singing and quirky instrumentation. Going back to his first album for this listen through gives us a mix of piano led jazz and blues, with a much smoother voice, but we are in familiar territory of melancholy late night bars, doomed love and regrets. My personal highlight is the bouncy Ice Cream Man that fades out into distinctive chimes. Excellent start!