Click here to listen to a great interview with Tom Waits on NPR's 'Fresh Air' from May 21, 2002
tom waits, tom waits discography
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Blood Money - Tom Waits
Blood Money is up there with Waits's best albums from the mid-'80s, veering as it does from sexy insomniac circus music to gorgeously heart-tugging lullabies to woozy zigzag bluesy romps to what can only be described as Oscar the Grouch singing out of tune on top of the soundtrack to an old French film. Blood Money's 13 songs were cowritten by Tom Waits and longtime collaborator and wife Kathleen Brennan for a Robert Wilson production of Georg Büchner's unfinished, protomodernist 1837 play, Woyzeck, about a Kafkaesque German soldier who goes crazy after doing medical experiments for money and kills his girlfriend after witnessing a perceived infidelity. The album's worldview is, necessarily, bleak. The lyrics are hilariously misanthropic, occasionally hallucinatory, and ring with the truth of Tin Pan Alley clichés turned inside out. "Coney Island Baby," in particular, is a grand statement, with Waits delicately croaking the lines "She's a rose, she's the pearl / She's the spin on my world / All the stars make their wishes on her eyes." The album's manifesto, however, is to be found in the title tune, as Waits spits out the words "If there's one thing you can say about mankind / There's nothing kind about man / You can drive out nature with a pitch fork / But it always comes roaring back again." Released at the same time as the lyrical, lovely Alice, the ragged and rhythmic Blood Money marks the return of one of our most gifted meta-singer-songwriters to the top of his game. --Mike McGonigal
tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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Alice - Tom Waits
The grizzled modern persona of Tom Waits finds new life on Alice, a slow, grave record that explores physical and moral decay with the same harrowing insight of 1992's Bone Machine. Originally written as an opera with his longtime songwriting partner, playwright Kathleen Brennan, the songs on Alice were performed live in a Hamburg theater for 18 months in 1992 and 1993, but were never committed to tape (officially, at least). This studio recording retains a sense of narrative cohesion, giving Waits a set of tormented and bizarre characters that go well with the motley crew he's assembled over the years. It is, in fact, the most consistent record of Waits's career, offering not only a stable train of thought, but a musical approach that, while featuring the same vaudevillian touches that have characterized his work since Swordfishtrombones, finds a voice all its own. Without much percussion to back them up, violins, cellos, and horns dominate the record, bathing Waits's familiar growl in a sly, slow cacophony that sounds like an underwater fugue, the notes like rust on the strings. "Watch Her Disappear," with its sparse, sad pump organ, and the twisted torch song "Reeperbahn" have the smoky café mystery of Edith Piaf by way of Leonard Cohen, recovered from the water-logged tapes in Cole Porter's long-lost dingy. It's a burst of dark, world-weary poetry for lonely Saturday nights, cloudy days on the beach, or long strolls through graveyards. --Matthew Cooke
tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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Swordfishtrombones - Tom Waits
The first album of the loose trilogy that also includes Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years, Swordfishtrombones marked a radical departure for Waits, whose avant-garde ambitions became plain not so much in his lyrics or subject matter--the songs here deal, as do his older albums, with hard life on the wrong side of the tracks and dreams of escape and transcendence--but in the music, a sound somewhere between German cabaret music from between the wars and contemporary Manhattan rush hour. Odd time signatures, unusual instrumentation (glass harmonicas and brake drums, among others), and Waits's barked vocals make this one of his most individualistic and challenging albums. --Daniel Durchholz
tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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Rain Dogs - Tom Waits
The middle album of the trilogy that includes Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years, Rain Dogs is Waits's best overall effort. The songs are first-rate, and there are a lot of them--19 in all, ranging from grim nightlife memoirs ("9th and Hennepin," "Singapore") to portraits of small-time hustlers ("Gun Street Girl," "Union Square") to bursts of street-corner philosophy ("Blind Love," "Time"). The album also contains the original version of "Downtown Train," which Rod Stewart turned into a smash hit. The image of "rain dogs"--animals who've lost their way home because the rain has washed away their scent--is an appropriate symbol for the entire cast of characters Waits has brought to life over the years, and this album has thus far proved to be his most enduring effort. --Daniel Durchholz
tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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Frank's Wild Years - Tom Waits
All the voices in Tom Waits' head come out on this CD: the growler (of course), the crooner, the preacher, the screecher, and the Vegas cheese ball. The instrumentation is equally eclectic. (Yep, that's Waits himself playing the "rooster" on the album's best song, "I'll Be Gone.") More memorable moments: "Innocent When You Dream" (both times), the vocal howling at the end of "Blow Wind Blow," and the lovely coughing fit after "I'll Take New York." Frank's Wild Years is the musical remains of a theatrical collaboration between Waits and Kathleen Brennan, originally staged in 1986. It contains nuggets of important practical advice, sure--"never drive a car when you're dead" (from "Telephone Call from Istanbul")--but mostly these songs are fantasy freaks. Frank's is big-time dreamer. It's a dreamy album. Sweet dreams. --Dan Leone
tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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Bone Machine - Tom Waits
Rolling Stone (10/29/92)
...It's a song older than Waits himself--older than Hank Williams, older than Robert Johnson--that Waits is chasing...Albums this rich with spiritual longing prove the validity of that effort...
tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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The Black Rider - Tom Waits
Summoned to Hamburg, Germany, to write music for a live stage production of Robert Wilson's The Black Rider, musical mastermind Waits took to the task at hand with gusto, assembling an eclectic crew of musicians to become "the pit band [he'd] always dreamed of." Several years later Waits assembled another "orchestra" in San Francisco to record many of the songs he'd written for the live production. Those tracks are found here, alongside a few rough gems from sessions in Hamburg. You'll find some musical matter familiar to Waits fans: accordions, carnivals, violas, banjos, the devil (a key figure in The Black Rider), a singing saw, bassoons, and trombones. Waits's many voices tell the rather disjointed story with a variety of musical styling, and the assembled whole is pretty much a sum of its parts (but at least they're interesting parts): a touch of Day of the Dead, a whiff of carny, a nod to Brecht, a dash of film noir, and the scent of narcosis (William Burroughs makes an appearance here). Not easy listening, by any means, but a feast for the ears. --Lorry Fleming
tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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Mule Variations - Tom Waits
Seven years passed between the release of Bone Machine and Mule Variations. During that time Tom Waits eschewed cutting another "conventional" (the term used loosely here) song collection, occupying his time with acting projects, a soundtrack (Night on Earth), a stage project (The Black Rider), and sundry smaller diversions. What's surprising about Mule Variations is how little he's strayed from the old Bone yard through the years. As with his Grammy-winning 1992 outing, Waits intersperses the tough and the tender, mixing exercises in creative noisemaking with tunes that fall on just the right side of maudlin. As with Bone Machine's "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me," "What's He Building?" is an experiment in word jazz that owes a debt to its creator, Ken Nordine. Waits has again assembled a crew of attuned sidemen (including Primus and steadfast backers Ralph Carney, Larry Taylor, and Joe Gore). And, as always, Waits and his wife-cosongwriter-coproducer Kathleen Brennan exhibit an uncanny ear for the arcane. In the end, Mule Variations is the aural equivalent of a salvage shop that, while largely familiar, still has a few secluded chambers and trap doors. --Steven Stolder
tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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Big Time - Tom Waits
The first live Tom Waits album since 1975's Nighthawks At The Diner is a shambling but vibrant affair which amply showcases the lowlife left-field musical strength of character which has so impressed performers from Pere Ubu to Robbie Robertson and the Pogues.
It is also the soundtrack of a film (which Tom Waits insists on calling a musicotheatrical experience played in dream time) built round concert footage shot during last year's tour, and recently premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival. The material is nearly all taken from Tom Waits' last three albums-Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years-and revels in a sense of ragged urgency. Indeed, it is plain to see how much further up river Tom Waits has travelled since the days of Nighthawks At The Diner, on his restless journey towards the heart of some peculiar darkness.
tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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Nighthawks at the Diner - Tom Waits
As tour guide on a trip through the midnight-to-dawn streets of Los Angeles that the beautiful people never see through the smoked-glass windows of their limos, Waits details the lives of hipsters, down-and-outers, and lost causes in latter-day beat poetry and small-jazz-combo arrangements. This live album from 1975 almost has the quality of standup comedy, but the routines are richer and more carefully drawn. Check out the vivid detail, low humor, and hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold emotionalism Waits brings to songs such as "Nighthawk Postcards," "Putnam County," and a memorable reading of trucker poet Red Sovine's "Big Joe and Phantom 309." --Daniel Durchholz
tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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Night on Earth Soundtrack - Tom Waits
Waits' soundtrack to this 1992 Jarmusch film is at times haunting, beautiful, deranged, aggravating, and amusing. Worth a listen by any Waits fan. Includes 3 vocal performances that rank among his best - particularly the waltz "Good Old World" and its instrumental equivalent.
tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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tom waits, tom waits discography
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