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#tomwaitsaweek — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #tomwaitsaweek, aggregated by home.social.

  1. 1001 Other Albums @[email protected] ·

    BowieADay 2025

    While 1001 Other Albums wasn’t yet around last January, for those who follow my personal Mastodon account, you may have seen that I do a deep dive into David Bowie’s discography this time every year. Ever since Bowie left us in 2016, I’ve focused my listening time each January around his discography, starting on his birthday (January 8, aka “Bowiemas”) through to the anniversary of him leaving us (January 10, aka “Bowienalia”) until the end of the month (or later).

    While in previous years I’ve typically crammed in as much Bowie as humanly possible, after a few of you expressed interest in joining me this year (yay!!!), I’ve decided to structure my Bowie vigil a bit more so we can all listen to the same albums together. And, since we learned our lesson after the whirlwind that was #TomWaitsAWeek, we’ve decided to take our time with Bowie, simply listening to one studio album a day in chronological order – a total of 26 albums over 26 days – with the option of listening to any extras on our own. Though we still have a few Bowie albums on The List to spotlight, unlike our Tom Waits week, I won’t be writing all those up to match our listening schedule this time around. However, we do have an excellent guest spotlight on the Low album lined up in time, so look for that next week (edit: here!). (Edit: We’re now planning on doing a community-wide, oral history sort of spotlight for Blackstar on its 10-year anniversary next year, January 8, 2026. Please message me if you’d like your thoughts included!)

    In case anyone else wants to join us, below is our listening schedule (complete with listening links), and we’ll be using the hashtag #BowieADay to toot our thoughts about it as we go through the albums. For any of you wanting some extra credit, I’ve added some suggested bonus listening, as well as other goodies. Note the bonus picks are by no means exhaustive. Aside from all the music videos/interviews/etc. the Internets provides, there’s been a TON of live albums and other previously unreleased stuff put out posthumously that you might want to explore on your own. I also highly recommend perusing Chris O’Leary’s in-depth look into every single Bowie song, as found on his Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog and collected/edited in his two books, Rebel Rebel: All the Songs of David Bowie from ’64 to ’76 and Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie, 1976-2016. I’ll be adding more bonus content as we go through the schedule, so feel free to check back later.

    Happy listening!

    #BowieADay 2025 Listening Schedule

    #Bowie #BowieADay #DavidBowie #music #musicDiscovery #Musodon #TomWaitsAWeek

    #bowie #bowieaday #davidbowie #music #musicdiscovery #musodon
  2. CalyxWorks @[email protected] ·

    I just learned about this hashtag – what a serendipitous coincidence that I turned a #HeartattackandVine earworm into a T-shirt this week?!

    calyxdesign.com/calyxworks/ain

    #TomWaitsAWeek

    #tomwaitsaweek #heartattackandvine
  3. Timbers Army Gorge Corps @[email protected] ·

    @CalyxWorks yes 👍 #tomwaitsaweek

    #tomwaitsaweek
  4. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 17/17

    And that's that. Bad As Me closes Tom Wait's discography. The album is very much a family and friends project. His son Casey provides drums and all the songs are co-written by Tom and his wife Kathleen Brennan.
    Keith Richards provided guitars and even vocals on Last Leaf.

    Now sadly, I don't expect a new album. Bad Ad Me covers all facets of his musical career. The melancholy, the stomping, the rumbling, the storytelling and the rockin'. Listening to it again, I realize that this is a musical farewell.

    But I hope that I am wrong.

    🎵 Hell Broke Luce by #TomWaits
    💿 Bad As Me, 2011
    ▶️ song.link/y/vM0GB5EJlr8

    The End.

    #tomwaits #tomwaitsaweek
  5. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 16

    In 2006 Tom Waits released a 3 CD box set called Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards with new songs, lost songs, unused songs and rarities.

    This was my very first Tom Waits album and so it has a special place in my heart.

    If you are more into blues rock oriented songs, go for Brawlers.
    If you want melancholic ballads, go for Bawlers.
    If you want to listen to a lecture about army ants, listen to Bastards:

    🎵 Army Ants by #TomWaits
    💿 Orphans, 2006
    ▶️ song.link/at/i/1485076736

    #tomwaits #tomwaitsaweek
  6. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    Once upon a time there was a poor child,
    with no father and no mother
    And everything was dead
    And no one was left in the whole world
    Everything was dead

    And the child went on search, day and night
    And since nobody was left on the earth,
    he wanted to go up into the heavens
    And the moon was looking at him so friendly
    And when he finally got to the moon,
    the moon was a piece of rotten wood

    #TomWaits #TomWaitsAWeek

    #tomwaitsaweek #tomwaits
  7. Ben @[email protected] ·

    Failing at #TomWaitsAWeek. I blame my work Christmas party

    #tomwaitsaweek
  8. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    I am having kind of a Bawlers day today.

    I feel like crap, but these ballads are soothing.

    🎵 Widow's Grove by #TomWaits
    💿 Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, 2006
    ▶️ song.link/y/4F8T5b1gItw

    #TomWaitsAWeek

    #tomwaitsaweek #tomwaits
  9. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    Alright folks, this is the last day of #TomWaitsAWeek

    In case you made it this far: congratulations!

    In case you need more time: take your time!

    In case you dropped out somewhere along the way: cool, but really, you should try the later albums at some point too.

    Anyhow, according to the schedule there are 2 albums left, one of which is a 3 CD box set:

    Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, 2006
    ▶️ album.link/at/i/1485076540

    Bas As Me, 2011
    ▶️ album.link/at/i/1485070792

    Have fun listening 🎧🎶

    #TomWaits

    #tomwaits #tomwaitsaweek
  10. 1001 Other Albums @[email protected] ·

    TomWaitsAWeek | Tom Waits – Alice (2002, US)

    Today’s spotlight is on number 526 on The List, submitted by swordgeek. This is the last spotlight in our #TomWaitsAWeek feature.[1]

    As mentioned in our previous spotlight, Waits’ 1993 album The Black Rider brought in someone who would become a key collaborator and influence on Waits, one Robert Wilson, an absolute fixture in the world of experimental/avant-garde theatre. While the earlier Franks Wild Years like Black Rider was also a stage-to-studio affair, I feel like adding Wilson into the mix amplifies the fact that the most Tom Waits of Tom Waits traits really glitter when the cinematic/stage-worthy qualities of his story-songs are given more room to breathe. Indeed, if, in another timeline, Waits only existed in the world of off-Broadway musical theatre, his brilliance would not be diminished in the least. So, yes, the Waits/Wilson collab albums – Black Rider, Alice (i.e., the subject of today’s spotlight), and Blood Money – are essentially soundtracks. And, because they’re soundtracks, it could be easy for someone who hasn’t yet heard them to feel intimidated without having seen their originating theatrical piece, or even assume these are curious artifacts only for Waits completists, akin to his film soundtracks. However, I would suggest one need not be guarded in approaching them. These albums, my friends, are absolute gems just as the ‘regular’ studio albums are, with Alice, imho, shining the brightest.

    Similar to how Waits had first written the Black Rider songs for the Wilson-directed musical/”cowboy opera” of the same name (which premiered in 1990), Waits and Kathleen Brennan wrote songs for Wilson’s opera Alice (which premiered in 1992) and then later tweaked them for the studio album. While Alice the opera is primarily about Lewis Carroll’s rather questionable/creepy thing for Alice Liddell, the young daughter of some friends and possibly his muse for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, at least when approached as an off-stage collection of songs, Alice seems but one character in a typical Waits-ian cast, complete with circus performers. And, given all we’ve heard thus far on our journey through Waits’ discography, the music itself is familiar territory, particularly with a few callbacks to Small Change‘s “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)”, as well as some of the eclectic instrumentation used since the beginning of his experimental phase. I, for one, really love this album, and would likely place both it and Black Rider in my Top 5 Waits Albums list, if I had to make one.

    Given my attempt to cover all the albums consecutively in the previous #TomWaitsAWeek spotlights, it should be noted here that Alice didn’t immediately follow Black Rider. First of all, there was an entire decade between the Alice opera and album. When asked by The Onion A.V. Club[2] on this matter, here is what Mr. Waits said:

    The Onion: So, why did it take you so long to record the songs on Alice?

    Tom Waits: The songs were written around ’92 or ’93, ’round in there. It was done with Robert Wilson in Germany. We stuck ’em in a box and just left ’em there for a while. They were aging like the honey. And we locked in the freshness. They were hermetically sealed. You move on to other things, you know? And then you go back and say, “Well, this was okay.”

    O: It was kind of developing a reputation as the great lost Tom Waits album.

    TW: I bought a copy of the bootleg on eBay. ‘Cause I didn’t know where those tapes were.

    During this decade, Waits also released a non-Wilson collab album, the fabulous Mule Variations (1999). I think I learned my lesson while writing the last spotlight though, so I won’t attempt to summarize that album here too. However, I would say that Mule Variations/Black Rider/Alice is perhaps my favorite run in Waits’ discography, for whatever that’s worth. I will also not attempt to summarize the final few albums, i.e., Blood Money (2002), Real Gone (2004), Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006), and Bad as Me (2011). Well, except for noting that Blood Money was actually released at the same time as Alice, and is also studio versions of songs that Waits and Brennan originally wrote for a Wilson musical (namely Woyzeck, which premiered in 2000), so let’s just say it’s Alice‘s fraternal (or conjoined?) twin.

    That said, I did want to ramble on a tiny bit further here before logging off to finish the rest of our listening schedule[1] for the week, because there’s some WONDERFUL rabbit holes to go down when looking at this partnership and period, particularly on Wilson’s side. In between Alice the opera and Alice the album, aside from the aforementioned Woyzeck, Wilson racked up a number of entries in his CV that blow my mind just thinking about them. For instance, in addition to a handful of new projects with Philip Glass (with whom, as mentioned last spotlight, he had collaborated with on the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach), during this time Wilson also collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto in 1999 for a Lincoln Center Festival piece called The Days Before – Death Destruction & Detroit III, which riffed off of my favorite Umberto Eco novel, The Island of the Day Before. Also, he completed the third in the trilogy of his works performed by the German Thalia Theater company (the first two being Black Rider and Alice), the 1996 Time Rocker, the music for which was written by none other than Lou Reed. AND THEN, Wilson would collaborate again with Reed in 2000 on an Edgar Allan Poe musical called POEtry, which ran at BAM. Reed would go on to release a studio album based on the musical, The Raven (2003), which features Willem Dafoe, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Steve Buscemi, Ornette Coleman, The Blind Boys of Alabama, David Bowie… Like, OMG, to have been in New York at that time!

    Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed/are enjoying #TomWaitsAWeek, or at least can devote some time in the future to the three Waits albums we have on The List…and beyond. I myself haven’t yet finished going through Waits’ studio discography, and also now have some physical media to track down. Speaking of which, I’ll sign off with one last thing from that Onion interview quoted above:

    Tom Waits: You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it’s hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs. “More silver discs. Please.” I enjoy that.

    The Onion: Do you have one in the Cadillac?

    TW: No, I have a little band in there. It’s an old car, so I have a little old string band in the glove compartment. It’s grumpy.

    Edit: As provided in the comments by icastico, here’s a link to a bootleg of the original Alice demos – they’re fantastic and definitely worth checking out!

    [1]For those listening through the discography with us, Alice was part of yesterday’s listening schedule. Here’s what’s left on the docket for today: Friday – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Bad as Me.
    [2]Thanks to BramMeehan for this link!

    #1001OtherAlbums #2000s #AliceInWonderland #experimental #KathleenBrennan #LewisCarroll #ListenToThis #LouReed #music #musicDiscovery #musical #Musodon #RobertWilson #RyuichiSakamoto #TomWaits #TomWaitsAWeek

    #1001otheralbums #2000s #aliceinwonderland #experimental #kathleenbrennan #lewiscarroll
  11. 1001 Other Albums @[email protected] ·

    TomWaitsAWeek | Tom Waits – Alice (2002, US)

    Today’s spotlight is on number 526 on The List, submitted by swordgeek. This is the last spotlight in our #TomWaitsAWeek feature.[1]

    As mentioned in our previous spotlight, Waits’ 1993 album The Black Rider brought in someone who would become a key collaborator and influence on Waits, one Robert Wilson, an absolute fixture in the world of experimental/avant-garde theatre. While the earlier Franks Wild Years like Black Rider was also a stage-to-studio affair, I feel like adding Wilson into the mix amplifies the fact that the most Tom Waits of Tom Waits traits really glitter when the cinematic/stage-worthy qualities of his story-songs are given more room to breathe. Indeed, if, in another timeline, Waits only existed in the world of off-Broadway musical theatre, his brilliance would not be diminished in the least. So, yes, the Waits/Wilson collab albums – Black Rider, Alice (i.e., the subject of today’s spotlight), and Blood Money – are essentially soundtracks. And, because they’re soundtracks, it could be easy for someone who hasn’t yet heard them to feel intimidated without having seen their originating theatrical piece, or even assume these are curious artifacts only for Waits completists, akin to his film soundtracks. However, I would suggest one need not be guarded in approaching them. These albums, my friends, are absolute gems just as the ‘regular’ studio albums are, with Alice, imho, shining the brightest.

    Similar to how Waits had first written the Black Rider songs for the Wilson-directed musical/”cowboy opera” of the same name (which premiered in 1990), Waits and Kathleen Brennan wrote songs for Wilson’s opera Alice (which premiered in 1992) and then later tweaked them for the studio album. While Alice the opera is primarily about Lewis Carroll’s rather questionable/creepy thing for Alice Liddell, the young daughter of some friends and possibly his muse for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, at least when approached as an off-stage collection of songs, Alice seems but one character in a typical Waits-ian cast, complete with circus performers. And, given all we’ve heard thus far on our journey through Waits’ discography, the music itself is familiar territory, particularly with a few callbacks to Small Change‘s “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)”, as well as some of the eclectic instrumentation used since the beginning of his experimental phase. I, for one, really love this album, and would likely place both it and Black Rider in my Top 5 Waits Albums list, if I had to make one.

    Given my attempt to cover all the albums consecutively in the previous #TomWaitsAWeek spotlights, it should be noted here that Alice didn’t immediately follow Black Rider. First of all, there was an entire decade between the Alice opera and album. When asked by The Onion A.V. Club[2] on this matter, here is what Mr. Waits said:

    The Onion: So, why did it take you so long to record the songs on Alice?

    Tom Waits: The songs were written around ’92 or ’93, ’round in there. It was done with Robert Wilson in Germany. We stuck ’em in a box and just left ’em there for a while. They were aging like the honey. And we locked in the freshness. They were hermetically sealed. You move on to other things, you know? And then you go back and say, “Well, this was okay.”

    O: It was kind of developing a reputation as the great lost Tom Waits album.

    TW: I bought a copy of the bootleg on eBay. ‘Cause I didn’t know where those tapes were.

    During this decade, Waits also released a non-Wilson collab album, the fabulous Mule Variations (1999). I think I learned my lesson while writing the last spotlight though, so I won’t attempt to summarize that album here too. However, I would say that Mule Variations/Black Rider/Alice is perhaps my favorite run in Waits’ discography, for whatever that’s worth. I will also not attempt to summarize the final few albums, i.e., Blood Money (2002), Real Gone (2004), Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006), and Bad as Me (2011). Well, except for noting that Blood Money was actually released at the same time as Alice, and is also studio versions of songs that Waits and Brennan originally wrote for a Wilson musical (namely Woyzeck, which premiered in 2000), so let’s just say it’s Alice‘s fraternal (or conjoined?) twin.

    That said, I did want to ramble on a tiny bit further here before logging off to finish the rest of our listening schedule[1] for the week, because there’s some WONDERFUL rabbit holes to go down when looking at this partnership and period, particularly on Wilson’s side. In between Alice the opera and Alice the album, aside from the aforementioned Woyzeck, Wilson racked up a number of entries in his CV that blow my mind just thinking about them. For instance, in addition to a handful of new projects with Philip Glass (with whom, as mentioned last spotlight, he had collaborated with on the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach), during this time Wilson also collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto in 1999 for a Lincoln Center Festival piece called The Days Before – Death Destruction & Detroit III, which riffed off of my favorite Umberto Eco novel, The Island of the Day Before. Also, he completed the third in the trilogy of his works performed by the German Thalia Theater company (the first two being Black Rider and Alice), the 1996 Time Rocker, the music for which was written by none other than Lou Reed. AND THEN, Wilson would collaborate again with Reed in 2000 on an Edgar Allan Poe musical called POEtry, which ran at BAM. Reed would go on to release a studio album based on the musical, The Raven (2003), which features Willem Dafoe, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Steve Buscemi, Ornette Coleman, The Blind Boys of Alabama, David Bowie… Like, OMG, to have been in New York at that time!

    Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed/are enjoying #TomWaitsAWeek, or at least can devote some time in the future to the three Waits albums we have on The List…and beyond. I myself haven’t yet finished going through Waits’ studio discography, and also now have some physical media to track down. Speaking of which, I’ll sign off with one last thing from that Onion interview quoted above:

    Tom Waits: You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it’s hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs. “More silver discs. Please.” I enjoy that.

    The Onion: Do you have one in the Cadillac?

    TW: No, I have a little band in there. It’s an old car, so I have a little old string band in the glove compartment. It’s grumpy.

    Edit: As provided in the comments by icastico, here’s a link to a bootleg of the original Alice demos – they’re fantastic and definitely worth checking out!

    [1]For those listening through the discography with us, Alice was part of yesterday’s listening schedule. Here’s what’s left on the docket for today: Friday – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Bad as Me.
    [2]Thanks to BramMeehan for this link!

    #1001OtherAlbums #2000s #AliceInWonderland #experimental #KathleenBrennan #LewisCarroll #ListenToThis #LouReed #music #musicDiscovery #musical #Musodon #RobertWilson #RyuichiSakamoto #TomWaits #TomWaitsAWeek

    #1001otheralbums #2000s #aliceinwonderland #experimental #kathleenbrennan #lewiscarroll
  12. 1001 Other Albums @[email protected] ·

    TomWaitsAWeek | Tom Waits – Alice (2002, US)

    Today’s spotlight is on number 526 on The List, submitted by swordgeek. This is the last spotlight in our #TomWaitsAWeek feature.1

    As mentioned in our previous spotlight, Waits’ 1993 album The Black Rider brought in someone who would become a key collaborator and influence on Waits, one Robert Wilson, an absolute fixture in the world of experimental/avant-garde theatre. While the earlier Franks Wild Years like Black Rider was also a stage-to-studio affair, I feel like adding Wilson into the mix amplifies the fact that the most Tom Waits of Tom Waits traits really glitter when the cinematic/stage-worthy qualities of his story-songs are given more room to breathe. Indeed, if, in another timeline, Waits only existed in the world of off-Broadway musical theatre, his brilliance would not be diminished in the least. So, yes, the Waits/Wilson collab albums – Black Rider, Alice (i.e., the subject of today’s spotlight), and Blood Money – are essentially soundtracks. And, because they’re soundtracks, it could be easy for someone who hasn’t yet heard them to feel intimidated without having seen their originating theatrical piece, or even assume these are curious artifacts only for Waits completists, akin to his film soundtracks. However, I would suggest one need not be guarded in approaching them. These albums, my friends, are absolute gems just as the ‘regular’ studio albums are, with Alice, imho, shining the brightest.

    Similar to how Waits had first written the Black Rider songs for the Wilson-directed musical/”cowboy opera” of the same name (which premiered in 1990), Waits and Kathleen Brennan wrote songs for Wilson’s opera Alice (which premiered in 1992) and then later tweaked them for the studio album. While Alice the opera is primarily about Lewis Carroll’s rather questionable/creepy thing for Alice Liddell, the young daughter of some friends and possibly his muse for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, at least when approached as an off-stage collection of songs, Alice seems but one character in a typical Waits-ian cast, complete with circus performers. And, given all we’ve heard thus far on our journey through Waits’ discography, the music itself is familiar territory, particularly with a few callbacks to Small Change‘s “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)”, as well as some of the eclectic instrumentation used since the beginning of his experimental phase. I, for one, really love this album, and would likely place both it and Black Rider in my Top 5 Waits Albums list, if I had to make one.

    Given my attempt to cover all the albums consecutively in the previous #TomWaitsAWeek spotlights, it should be noted here that Alice didn’t immediately follow Black Rider. First of all, there was an entire decade between the Alice opera and album. When asked by The Onion A.V. Club2 on this matter, here is what Mr. Waits said:

    The Onion: So, why did it take you so long to record the songs on Alice?

    Tom Waits: The songs were written around ’92 or ’93, ’round in there. It was done with Robert Wilson in Germany. We stuck ’em in a box and just left ’em there for a while. They were aging like the honey. And we locked in the freshness. They were hermetically sealed. You move on to other things, you know? And then you go back and say, “Well, this was okay.”

    O: It was kind of developing a reputation as the great lost Tom Waits album.

    TW: I bought a copy of the bootleg on eBay. ‘Cause I didn’t know where those tapes were.

    During this decade, Waits also released a non-Wilson collab album, the fabulous Mule Variations (1999). I think I learned my lesson while writing the last spotlight though, so I won’t attempt to summarize that album here too. However, I would say that Mule Variations/Black Rider/Alice is perhaps my favorite run in Waits’ discography, for whatever that’s worth. I will also not attempt to summarize the final few albums, i.e., Blood Money (2002), Real Gone (2004), Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006), and Bad as Me (2011). Well, except for noting that Blood Money was actually released at the same time as Alice, and is also studio versions of songs that Waits and Brennan originally wrote for a Wilson musical (namely Woyzeck, which premiered in 2000), so let’s just say it’s Alice‘s fraternal (or conjoined?) twin.

    That said, I did want to ramble on a tiny bit further here before logging off to finish the rest of our listening schedule1 for the week, because there’s some WONDERFUL rabbit holes to go down when looking at this partnership and period, particularly on Wilson’s side. In between Alice the opera and Alice the album, aside from the aforementioned Woyzeck, Wilson racked up a number of entries in his CV that blow my mind just thinking about them. For instance, in addition to a handful of new projects with Philip Glass (with whom, as mentioned last spotlight, he had collaborated with on the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach), during this time Wilson also collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto in 1999 for a Lincoln Center Festival piece called The Days Before – Death Destruction & Detroit III, which riffed off of my favorite Umberto Eco novel, The Island of the Day Before. Also, he completed the third in the trilogy of his works performed by the German Thalia Theater company (the first two being Black Rider and Alice), the 1996 Time Rocker, the music for which was written by none other than Lou Reed. AND THEN, Wilson would collaborate again with Reed in 2000 on an Edgar Allan Poe musical called POEtry, which ran at BAM. Reed would go on to release a studio album based on the musical, The Raven (2003), which features Willem Dafoe, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Steve Buscemi, Ornette Coleman, The Blind Boys of Alabama, David Bowie… Like, OMG, to have been in New York at that time!

    Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed/are enjoying #TomWaitsAWeek, or at least can devote some time in the future to the three Waits albums we have on The List…and beyond. I myself haven’t yet finished going through Waits’ studio discography, and also now have some physical media to track down. Speaking of which, I’ll sign off with one last thing from that Onion interview quoted above:

    Tom Waits: You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it’s hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs. “More silver discs. Please.” I enjoy that.

    The Onion: Do you have one in the Cadillac?

    TW: No, I have a little band in there. It’s an old car, so I have a little old string band in the glove compartment. It’s grumpy.

    1For those listening through the discography with us, Alice was part of yesterday’s listening schedule. Here’s what’s left on the docket for today: Friday – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Bad as Me.
    2Thanks to BramMeehan for this link!

    #1001OtherAlbums #2000s #AliceInWonderland #experimental #KathleenBrennan #LewisCarroll #ListenToThis #LouReed #music #musicDiscovery #musical #Musodon #RobertWilson #RyuichiSakamoto #TomWaits #TomWaitsAWeek

    #1001otheralbums #2000s #aliceinwonderland #experimental #kathleenbrennan #lewiscarroll
  13. 1001 Other Albums @[email protected] ·

    TomWaitsAWeek | Tom Waits – Alice (2002, US)

    Today’s spotlight is on number 526 on The List, submitted by swordgeek. This is the last spotlight in our #TomWaitsAWeek feature.[1]

    As mentioned in our previous spotlight, Waits’ 1993 album The Black Rider brought in someone who would become a key collaborator and influence on Waits, one Robert Wilson, an absolute fixture in the world of experimental/avant-garde theatre. While the earlier Franks Wild Years like Black Rider was also a stage-to-studio affair, I feel like adding Wilson into the mix amplifies the fact that the most Tom Waits of Tom Waits traits really glitter when the cinematic/stage-worthy qualities of his story-songs are given more room to breathe. Indeed, if, in another timeline, Waits only existed in the world of off-Broadway musical theatre, his brilliance would not be diminished in the least. So, yes, the Waits/Wilson collab albums – Black Rider, Alice (i.e., the subject of today’s spotlight), and Blood Money – are essentially soundtracks. And, because they’re soundtracks, it could be easy for someone who hasn’t yet heard them to feel intimidated without having seen their originating theatrical piece, or even assume these are curious artifacts only for Waits completists, akin to his film soundtracks. However, I would suggest one need not be guarded in approaching them. These albums, my friends, are absolute gems just as the ‘regular’ studio albums are, with Alice, imho, shining the brightest.

    Similar to how Waits had first written the Black Rider songs for the Wilson-directed musical/”cowboy opera” of the same name (which premiered in 1990), Waits and Kathleen Brennan wrote songs for Wilson’s opera Alice (which premiered in 1992) and then later tweaked them for the studio album. While Alice the opera is primarily about Lewis Carroll’s rather questionable/creepy thing for Alice Liddell, the young daughter of some friends and possibly his muse for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, at least when approached as an off-stage collection of songs, Alice seems but one character in a typical Waits-ian cast, complete with circus performers. And, given all we’ve heard thus far on our journey through Waits’ discography, the music itself is familiar territory, particularly with a few callbacks to Small Change‘s “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)”, as well as some of the eclectic instrumentation used since the beginning of his experimental phase. I, for one, really love this album, and would likely place both it and Black Rider in my Top 5 Waits Albums list, if I had to make one.

    Given my attempt to cover all the albums consecutively in the previous #TomWaitsAWeek spotlights, it should be noted here that Alice didn’t immediately follow Black Rider. First of all, there was an entire decade between the Alice opera and album. When asked by The Onion A.V. Club[2] on this matter, here is what Mr. Waits said:

    The Onion: So, why did it take you so long to record the songs on Alice?

    Tom Waits: The songs were written around ’92 or ’93, ’round in there. It was done with Robert Wilson in Germany. We stuck ’em in a box and just left ’em there for a while. They were aging like the honey. And we locked in the freshness. They were hermetically sealed. You move on to other things, you know? And then you go back and say, “Well, this was okay.”

    O: It was kind of developing a reputation as the great lost Tom Waits album.

    TW: I bought a copy of the bootleg on eBay. ‘Cause I didn’t know where those tapes were.

    During this decade, Waits also released a non-Wilson collab album, the fabulous Mule Variations (1999). I think I learned my lesson while writing the last spotlight though, so I won’t attempt to summarize that album here too. However, I would say that Mule Variations/Black Rider/Alice is perhaps my favorite run in Waits’ discography, for whatever that’s worth. I will also not attempt to summarize the final few albums, i.e., Blood Money (2002), Real Gone (2004), Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006), and Bad as Me (2011). Well, except for noting that Blood Money was actually released at the same time as Alice, and is also studio versions of songs that Waits and Brennan originally wrote for a Wilson musical (namely Woyzeck, which premiered in 2000), so let’s just say it’s Alice‘s fraternal (or conjoined?) twin.

    That said, I did want to ramble on a tiny bit further here before logging off to finish the rest of our listening schedule[1] for the week, because there’s some WONDERFUL rabbit holes to go down when looking at this partnership and period, particularly on Wilson’s side. In between Alice the opera and Alice the album, aside from the aforementioned Woyzeck, Wilson racked up a number of entries in his CV that blow my mind just thinking about them. For instance, in addition to a handful of new projects with Philip Glass (with whom, as mentioned last spotlight, he had collaborated with on the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach), during this time Wilson also collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto in 1999 for a Lincoln Center Festival piece called The Days Before – Death Destruction & Detroit III, which riffed off of my favorite Umberto Eco novel, The Island of the Day Before. Also, he completed the third in the trilogy of his works performed by the German Thalia Theater company (the first two being Black Rider and Alice), the 1996 Time Rocker, the music for which was written by none other than Lou Reed. AND THEN, Wilson would collaborate again with Reed in 2000 on an Edgar Allan Poe musical called POEtry, which ran at BAM. Reed would go on to release a studio album based on the musical, The Raven (2003), which features Willem Dafoe, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Steve Buscemi, Ornette Coleman, The Blind Boys of Alabama, David Bowie… Like, OMG, to have been in New York at that time!

    Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed/are enjoying #TomWaitsAWeek, or at least can devote some time in the future to the three Waits albums we have on The List…and beyond. I myself haven’t yet finished going through Waits’ studio discography, and also now have some physical media to track down. Speaking of which, I’ll sign off with one last thing from that Onion interview quoted above:

    Tom Waits: You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it’s hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs. “More silver discs. Please.” I enjoy that.

    The Onion: Do you have one in the Cadillac?

    TW: No, I have a little band in there. It’s an old car, so I have a little old string band in the glove compartment. It’s grumpy.

    Edit: As provided in the comments by icastico, here’s a link to a bootleg of the original Alice demos – they’re fantastic and definitely worth checking out!

    [1]For those listening through the discography with us, Alice was part of yesterday’s listening schedule. Here’s what’s left on the docket for today: Friday – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Bad as Me.
    [2]Thanks to BramMeehan for this link!

    #1001OtherAlbums #2000s #AliceInWonderland #experimental #KathleenBrennan #LewisCarroll #ListenToThis #LouReed #music #musicDiscovery #musical #Musodon #RobertWilson #RyuichiSakamoto #TomWaits #TomWaitsAWeek

    #tomwaitsaweek #tomwaits #ryuichisakamoto #robertwilson #musodon #musical
  14. 1001 Other Albums @[email protected] ·

    TomWaitsAWeek | Tom Waits – Alice (2002, US)

    Today’s spotlight is on number 526 on The List, submitted by swordgeek. This is the last spotlight in our #TomWaitsAWeek feature.1

    As mentioned in our previous spotlight, Waits’ 1993 album The Black Rider brought in someone who would become a key collaborator and influence on Waits, one Robert Wilson, an absolute fixture in the world of experimental/avant-garde theatre. While the earlier Franks Wild Years like Black Rider was also a stage-to-studio affair, I feel like adding Wilson into the mix amplifies the fact that the most Tom Waits of Tom Waits traits really glitter when the cinematic/stage-worthy qualities of his story-songs are given more room to breathe. Indeed, if, in another timeline, Waits only existed in the world of off-Broadway musical theatre, his brilliance would not be diminished in the least. So, yes, the Waits/Wilson collab albums – Black Rider, Alice (i.e., the subject of today’s spotlight), and Blood Money – are essentially soundtracks. And, because they’re soundtracks, it could be easy for someone who hasn’t yet heard them to feel intimidated without having seen their originating theatrical piece, or even assume these are curious artifacts only for Waits completists, akin to his film soundtracks. However, I would suggest one need not be guarded in approaching them. These albums, my friends, are absolute gems just as the ‘regular’ studio albums are, with Alice, imho, shining the brightest.

    Similar to how Waits had first written the Black Rider songs for the Wilson-directed musical/”cowboy opera” of the same name (which premiered in 1990), Waits and Kathleen Brennan wrote songs for Wilson’s opera Alice (which premiered in 1992) and then later tweaked them for the studio album. While Alice the opera is primarily about Lewis Carroll’s rather questionable/creepy thing for Alice Liddell, the young daughter of some friends and possibly his muse for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, at least when approached as an off-stage collection of songs, Alice seems but one character in a typical Waits-ian cast, complete with circus performers. And, given all we’ve heard thus far on our journey through Waits’ discography, the music itself is familiar territory, particularly with a few callbacks to Small Change‘s “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)”, as well as some of the eclectic instrumentation used since the beginning of his experimental phase. I, for one, really love this album, and would likely place both it and Black Rider in my Top 5 Waits Albums list, if I had to make one.

    Given my attempt to cover all the albums consecutively in the previous #TomWaitsAWeek spotlights, it should be noted here that Alice didn’t immediately follow Black Rider. First of all, there was an entire decade between the Alice opera and album. When asked by The Onion A.V. Club2 on this matter, here is what Mr. Waits said:

    The Onion: So, why did it take you so long to record the songs on Alice?

    Tom Waits: The songs were written around ’92 or ’93, ’round in there. It was done with Robert Wilson in Germany. We stuck ’em in a box and just left ’em there for a while. They were aging like the honey. And we locked in the freshness. They were hermetically sealed. You move on to other things, you know? And then you go back and say, “Well, this was okay.”

    O: It was kind of developing a reputation as the great lost Tom Waits album.

    TW: I bought a copy of the bootleg on eBay. ‘Cause I didn’t know where those tapes were.

    During this decade, Waits also released a non-Wilson collab album, the fabulous Mule Variations (1999). I think I learned my lesson while writing the last spotlight though, so I won’t attempt to summarize that album here too. However, I would say that Mule Variations/Black Rider/Alice is perhaps my favorite run in Waits’ discography, for whatever that’s worth. I will also not attempt to summarize the final few albums, i.e., Blood Money (2002), Real Gone (2004), Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006), and Bad as Me (2011). Well, except for noting that Blood Money was actually released at the same time as Alice, and is also studio versions of songs that Waits and Brennan originally wrote for a Wilson musical (namely Woyzeck, which premiered in 2000), so let’s just say it’s Alice‘s fraternal (or conjoined?) twin.

    That said, I did want to ramble on a tiny bit further here before logging off to finish the rest of our listening schedule1 for the week, because there’s some WONDERFUL rabbit holes to go down when looking at this partnership and period, particularly on Wilson’s side. In between Alice the opera and Alice the album, aside from the aforementioned Woyzeck, Wilson racked up a number of entries in his CV that blow my mind just thinking about them. For instance, in addition to a handful of new projects with Philip Glass (with whom, as mentioned last spotlight, he had collaborated with on the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach), during this time Wilson also collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto in 1999 for a Lincoln Center Festival piece called The Days Before – Death Destruction & Detroit III, which riffed off of my favorite Umberto Eco novel, The Island of the Day Before. Also, he completed the third in the trilogy of his works performed by the German Thalia Theater company (the first two being Black Rider and Alice), the 1996 Time Rocker, the music for which was written by none other than Lou Reed. AND THEN, Wilson would collaborate again with Reed in 2000 on an Edgar Allan Poe musical called POEtry, which ran at BAM. Reed would go on to release a studio album based on the musical, The Raven (2003), which features Willem Dafoe, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Steve Buscemi, Ornette Coleman, The Blind Boys of Alabama, David Bowie… Like, OMG, to have been in New York at that time!

    Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed/are enjoying #TomWaitsAWeek, or at least can devote some time in the future to the three Waits albums we have on The List…and beyond. I myself haven’t yet finished going through Waits’ studio discography, and also now have some physical media to track down. Speaking of which, I’ll sign off with one last thing from that Onion interview quoted above:

    Tom Waits: You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it’s hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs. “More silver discs. Please.” I enjoy that.

    The Onion: Do you have one in the Cadillac?

    TW: No, I have a little band in there. It’s an old car, so I have a little old string band in the glove compartment. It’s grumpy.

    1For those listening through the discography with us, Alice was part of yesterday’s listening schedule. Here’s what’s left on the docket for today: Friday – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Bad as Me.
    2Thanks to BramMeehan for this link!

    #1001OtherAlbums #2000s #AliceInWonderland #experimental #KathleenBrennan #LewisCarroll #ListenToThis #LouReed #music #musicDiscovery #musical #Musodon #RobertWilson #RyuichiSakamoto #TomWaits #TomWaitsAWeek

    #1001otheralbums #2000s #aliceinwonderland #experimental #kathleenbrennan #lewiscarroll
  15. the buff who fell to earth @[email protected] ·

    Now listening to the last album on today's listening schedule for #TomWaitsAWeek - the somewhat surprisingly* amazing Real Gone - and, since I've literally only heard Sheboygan referenced before in Home Alone, I'm now going to consider this song an Xmas tune.

    *Wait, why am I surprised? Waits never fails!

    youtube.com/watch?v=D9SyssbAzD

    #tomwaitsaweek
  16. the buff who fell to earth @[email protected] ·

    Writing our last #TomWaitsAWeek spotlight for the @1001otheralbums.com blog and somehow went down a side trail that involves Sting. I need more coffee.

    #tomwaitsaweek
  17. icastico @[email protected] ·

    For those doing #TomWaitsAWeek - here is a collection of his appearances on Letterman - This was the place that most people were introduced to America's greatest song writer.

    youtu.be/wflJVB4cM_c

    #tomwaitsaweek
  18. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 15

    She took all my money
    And my best friend
    You know the story
    Here it comes again

    Real Gone reminds me a lot of Mule Variations. Like Mule Variations it has some of my favourite songs on it. Hoist That Rag and Make It Rain I can listen to on repeat for days.

    Oh what a storyteller Mr. Waits is.

    Gotta make it rain
    Make it rain

    🎵 Make It Rain by #TomWaits
    💿 Real Gone, 2004
    ▶️ song.link/at/i/1485070897

    15 albums done, 2 to go.

    #tomwaits #tomwaitsaweek
  19. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 14

    Blood Money consists of songs written for yet another Rober Wilson play: Woyzeck.

    I was lucky enough to see this play at Volkstheater Vienna some years ago.
    I love so many songs on this album, from the stomping Misery Is The River Of The World to the melancholic sweet Coney Island Baby. And it hast the most Tom Waits Tom Waits song on it:

    🎵 God's Away On Business by #TomWaits
    💿 Blood Money, 2002
    ▶️ song.link/at/i/1485070290

    #tomwaits #tomwaitsaweek
  20. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 13

    Alice is yet another collaboration with Robert Wilson. It the soundtrack to an opera with the same name.

    Tom Waits again opened the cabinet of curiosities. Odd experiments and lovely sentimental ballads are on the menu.

    If you like Tom Waits, you'll like this one. If you don't like Tom Waits, this album won't change your mind.

    🎵 Reeperbahn by #TomWaits
    💿 Alice, 2002
    ▶️ song.link/y/YGIgCb_u654

    #tomwaits #tomwaitsaweek
  21. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 12

    Chocolate Jesus
    Hold On
    Get Behind The Mule
    Big In Japan
    Eyeball Kid
    Picture In A Frame

    ...Mule Variations is like a "Best Of" album. Now I don't plan on doing a ranking in the end, but this one... this one is amazeballs.

    #MuleVariations is more accessible than his previous, more experimental albums. Yet it is bursting with ideas, growls, howls, stomps and riffs in the best Tom Waits manner. I love this man, really!

    🎵 Come On Up To The House by #TomWaits
    💿 Mule Variations, 1999
    ▶️ song.link/y/x0dtDbzyBs0

    And we still don't know what he's building in there. We have a right to know!

    #tomwaits #mulevariations #tomwaitsaweek
  22. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    Good morning fellow tooters!

    This is today's agenda for #TomWaitsAWeek

    Will we finally find out what he is building in there?

    # Thursday

    Mule Variations, 1999
    ▶️ album.link/at/i/1485070836

    Alice, 2002
    ▶️ album.link/at/i/1485070618

    Blood Money, 2002
    ▶️ album.link/at/i/1485070285

    Real Gone, 2004
    ▶️ album.link/at/i/1772300120

    #tomwaitsaweek
  23. the buff who fell to earth @[email protected] ·

    I've started in on tomorrow's listening schedule for #TomWaitsAWeek, currently listening to (the fabulous!) Mule Variations. Just got to "Chocolate Jesus" and OMG I wish there could've been a Temple of the Dog/Tom Waits split 7" where they covered each other's Jesus songs (TotD's of course being "Wooden Jesus").

    (Once again, why am I like this?)

    #tomwaitsaweek
  24. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 11

    Did you watch Poor Things? The Black Rider is the soundtrack of this movie made 30 years in advance. I swear.

    Ok, The Black Rider is actually another theater play (not the last one!). It is quirky, odd, experimental, funny and sentimental and, above all, lovely and brilliant!
    And there's Oily Night wich I can't even begin to describe.

    I hope to see the play one day.

    🎵 Lucky Day by #TomWaits
    💿 The Black Rider, 1993
    ▶️ song.link/at/i/1695048283

    #tomwaits #tomwaitsaweek
  25. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    If you love a song, you love a song.
    I love this song 👇

    🎵 Russian Dance by #TomWaits
    💿 The Black Rider, 1993
    ▶️ song.link/y/600guVi0dHk

    #TomWaitsAWeek

    #tomwaitsaweek #tomwaits
  26. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 10

    #BoneMachine, man, it's like the soundtrack to a western movie I'd like to watch.

    Here's an unrelated story: E once asked Tom Waits if he'd like to contribute vocals to an Eels song. Shortly after, E received tapes from Mr. Waits. The were filled with baby screams and other noises made by the master himself*.

    I guess Tom Waits doesn't want to grow up.

    🎵 I Don't Wanna Grow Up by #TomWaits
    💿 Bone Machine, 1992
    ▶️ song.link/y/8BGPo_3Gw28

    *listen to Eels - Going Fetal if you wanna know who that sounds. Yeah, it sounds like that.

    #tomwaits #bonemachine #tomwaitsaweek
  27. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 10

    Franks Wild Years is probably the album I listened to the least. It is basically a theater play.

    It is a bit less rumbling tooting banging whistling and a bit more back to drunken Heartattack and Vine piano play. Still weird, still great!

    My favourite track by far is this one 👇

    🎵 Innocent When You Dream (Barroom) by #TomWaits
    💿 Franks Wild Years, 1987
    ▶️ song.link/y/mhH3_QwK4-g

    #tomwaits #tomwaitsaweek
  28. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 9

    Rain Dogs is the first album that doesn't feature Tom Waits on the album cover.
    Wait, what?

    It also answers the question of how many stories you can pack into a 1 minute 47 seconds song (Cementery Polka).

    I really don't know what else I could say about this album apart from the fact that this is as good as it gets, top notch, the finest whiskey.

    It is impossible to pick a favourite here (even though it is Jockey Full of Bourbon) so I'm spotlighting the one with Keith Richards on guitars:

    🎵 Big Black Mariah by #TomWaits
    💿 Rain Dogs, 1985
    ▶️ song.link/y/ReXWjNLuWJw

    And please watch Down By Law.

    #tomwaits #tomwaitsaweek
  29. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 8

    #Swordfishtrombones is a cornerstone in Tom Waits' career. It introduces all sorts of new instruments I couldn't even name.

    Same problem with my favourite track on the album. I couldn't even name one.

    Swordfishtrombones is utterly brilliant!

    There's a world going on underground, you know?

    🎵 Underground by #TomWaits
    💿 Swordfishtrombones, 1983
    ▶️ song.link/y/mfAB2AR_93k

    I have a lot to say about this album, but @buffyleigh does it so much better, so please, do yourself a favour and continue reading here: metalhead.club/@1001otheralbum

    ...and follow @1001otheralbums.com while you're at it!

    #swordfishtrombones #tomwaits #tomwaitsaweek
  30. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    Ok, I guess creating a Best of Tom Waits playlist is pointles when you end up adding all the songs anyhow 🤷‍♂️

    #TomWaitsAWeek

    #tomwaitsaweek
  31. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    I keep wondering... why is Swordfishtrombones not my favourite Tom Waits album?

    Ah, right, because all of them are 💡

    🎵 16 Shells From A 30.6 by #TomWaits
    💿 Swordfishtrombones, 1983
    ▶️ song.link/y/fAEv1boKC3Y

    #TomWaitsAWeek #TomAwaitsTomWaits

    #tomawaitstomwaits #tomwaitsaweek #tomwaits
  32. Thomas @[email protected] ·

    #TomWaitsAWeek Log entry 7

    Sometimes things are so obvious that I don't even recognize them. For example that Heartattack and Vine is the first Tom Waits album where an electric guitar is heavily used. (@buffyleigh brought this to my attention)

    I like dry and dirty garage blues rock, which is what you get on this album a lot. But you also get "The Heart of Saturday Night" like ballads (On a Nickel, Ruby's Arms). Heck, you even get a radio friendly rock song (Jersey Girl).

    I like the raw and dirty ones, so hit me with Downtown and Heartattack and Vine any time!

    🎵 Downtown by #TomWaits
    💿 Heartattack and Vine, 1980
    ▶️ song.link/y/rJYrcvkkhZ0

    #tomwaits #tomwaitsaweek
  33. 1001 Other Albums @[email protected] ·

    TomWaitsAWeek | Tom Waits – Rain Dogs (1985, US)

    Today’s spotlight is on number 315 on The List, and the second in our #TomWaitsAWeek feature. Fun fact: Rain Dogs album was the most repeated submission when we were first compiling The List, with something like 5+ people submitting it at the same time;[1] CliftonR was the first to get in their vote, so they get the attribution. I’m going to apologize right off that bat to those 5+ people and anyone else who knows how great this album is – while Rain Dogs absolutely deserves its own dedicated and lengthy spotlight, it essentially shares this one with the 4 albums that preceded it and the 3 that came after. For that matter, each album mentioned here deserves its own spotlight. Alas, more Waits is better than less, so let’s not wait any longer and dig in…

    Yesterday’s listening schedule[2] for #TomWaitsAWeek included some huge shifts in Tom Waits’ sound and life. Foreign Affairs (1977) and Blue Valentine (1978) are perhaps not too far away from the preceding Small Change, albeit with amped up cinematic vibes, more strings, the first swapping of the piano for an electric guitar, and the first appearance (in “$29.00”) of what will become Waits’ signature drunk howl (thanks to satsuma for that phrase!). Foreign Affairs is also the first album that makes me picture the eyes closed/eyebrows raised/can’t lose face Waits often pulls while singing, though I’m sure it was there in the earlier albums (if not the recording, then definitely the live performances). Then, with Heartattack and Vine (1980), suddenly we are in electric guitar-based R&B territory, the sound seeming to move from a bar corner to a proper stage. But, perhaps most importantly, we catch a completely smitten Waits singing a seemingly non-Waits lyric – “sha-la-la-la-la-la”, in “Jersey Girl”. The girl? One Kathleen Brennan, who would impact Waits and his sound immensely, from one wonderful day forward.

    Waits wrote Heartattack and Vine while taking a break from writing the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1981), on the set of which he re-met Brennan, who he had first met while filming Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley (1978; Waits’ film debut). It apparently was love at second sight – the two were engaged within a week, and married the month before Heartattack was released.

    Waits has apparently said of Brennan that he didn’t just marry a wife, but also a record collection. Brennan introduced Waits to a bunch of new music, perhaps the most influential to his own evolving sound being Captain Beefheart and composer Harry Partch (who made his own instruments). With the life changes and Brennan’s encouragement, Waits also changed managers and producers – to himself and Brennan – and used the opportunity to, essentially, reinvent himself. Thus we have the absolute masterpiece that is Swordfishtrombones (1983), the first of Waits’ experimental era – the first Waits’ album to not feature saxophone, the first to have marimba (and various eclectic instruments), and, really, the first to have music that finally seems to live in the same postal code as the vocals. It’s weird, it’s whacky, it’s what most now likely consider pure Waits. It should be in every record collection, and should have it’s own full blog (like, an entire blog, not just a blog post) dissecting every second of it. Also, it was released on my day of birth, which gives it extra bonus points from me.

    Swordfishtrombones is the beginning of a loose trilogy of albums, the second of which is technically the subject of this spotlight (and our first album in today’s listening schedule): Rain Dogs. While continuing along the lines of Swordfishtrombones plus adding in the plethora of new influences and experiences that came with Waits’ and Brennan’s move to New York City (including Waits’ growing filmography), Rain Dogs also brings back in all the best things of the pre-Brennan albums (including some of that country rock twang from Closing Time, in “Blind Love”). It’s a ‘best of’ bag of Waits’ tricks, if you will, but notably less whisky-soaked. The result is a couple of surprisingly rather radio-friendly tunes (well, alternative radio, at any rate) including “Hang Down Your Head” (the first tune co-written with Brennan), as well as some cinema-friendly tunes, with songs from the album bookending the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law (1986; which Waits also starred in). And, another super duper (not really) important thing that really stands out, to me at least: end-of-song FADE OUTS. Perhaps they were in previous Waits albums, but for some reason these are the first I recall, enough to point out, lol. Anyway, and again, it deserves more than the cursory glance here, so be sure to give it a few spins and gather your own thoughts about it. Whether it was the fade outs, the film cred, or just people knowing what’s what, it’s not hard to see why this album made and continues to make a number of lists, including the “official” 1001 list.

    Following Rain Dogs, we get Franks Wild Years (1987), the last in the trilogy and thus another album in a similar vein. This album continues the story of one Frank, first seen in Swordfishtrombones‘ track of the same name (well, with the grammatically correct apostrophe), via songs first written (some co-written by Brennan) for a play. The real standout for me on this album – and, as far as I can remember, my first introduction to Waits – is the spectacular “Way Down in the Hole”, which was used/covered for The Wire‘s theme song. My advice? Get the entire trilogy and listen to all of them in a row, a few times over, as their own separate #TomWaitsAWeek. And then, for bonus marks, check out all the cover versions done for The Wire, if you haven’t already. For myself, I haven’t yet devoted enough time to Franks, so I’m planning on getting a lot more spins in soon.

    The last two albums on our listening schedule today carry on the experimentation of the Sword/Rain/Franks trilogy, albeit with different vibes. On Bone Machine (1992), perhaps it’s because of the title but I can’t help but hear some Pixies vibes, also some Leonard Cohen vibes (“Black Wings”) – in other words, there’s a LOT of different stuff going on in this one. Again, it deserves it’s own spotlight, and more than a quick spin. And then, The Black Rider (1993) is another play-to-album collection of songs, the play in question co-written by none other than William S. Burroughs and directed by Robert Wilson (perhaps known by many as Philip Glass’ collaborator on Einstein on the Beach). Waits will very soon again collaborate with Wilson on what becomes Alice and Blood Money (both 2002).

    Alice is the third and last Waits album we have in The List, and is one of the albums in tomorrow’s listening schedule (along with Blood Money). Because I’m only human I won’t have its spotlight ready prior to listening, but we’ll meet back here on Friday to discuss it, and cap off our #TomWaitsAWeek.

    Until then, I hope you don’t have to wait to listen to more Waits!

    [1]Apologies for the wishy-washy data, but I only tracked the first time an album was submitted, so this is going off my shoddy memory of how many times I replied “already added!” to people. I do remember with certainty that SpaceAce was one of those people, btw.
    [2]For those wanting to listen through the discography with us, here’s what is left in the schedule, of studio albums plus the Orphans box set (any live/soundtrack/etc. albums are extracurricular!): Wednesday – Rain Dogs, Franks Wild Years, Bone Machine, The Black Rider; Thursday – Mule Variations, Alice, Blood Money, Real Gone; Friday – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Bad as Me

    #1001OtherAlbums #1980s #experimental #experimentalRock #KathleenBrennan #ListenToThis #musicDiscovery #Musodon #TomWaits #TomWaitsAWeek

    #1001otheralbums #1980s #experimental #experimentalrock #kathleenbrennan #listentothis
  34. 1001 Other Albums @[email protected] ·

    TomWaitsAWeek | Tom Waits – Rain Dogs (1985, US)

    Today’s spotlight is on number 315 on The List, and the second in our #TomWaitsAWeek feature. Fun fact: Rain Dogs album was the most repeated submission when we were first compiling The List, with something like 5+ people submitting it at the same time;[1] CliftonR was the first to get in their vote, so they get the attribution. I’m going to apologize right off that bat to those 5+ people and anyone else who knows how great this album is – while Rain Dogs absolutely deserves its own dedicated and lengthy spotlight, it essentially shares this one with the 4 albums that preceded it and the 3 that came after. For that matter, each album mentioned here deserves its own spotlight. Alas, more Waits is better than less, so let’s not wait any longer and dig in…

    Yesterday’s listening schedule[2] for #TomWaitsAWeek included some huge shifts in Tom Waits’ sound and life. Foreign Affairs (1977) and Blue Valentine (1978) are perhaps not too far away from the preceding Small Change, albeit with amped up cinematic vibes, more strings, the first swapping of the piano for an electric guitar, and the first appearance (in “$29.00”) of what will become Waits’ signature drunk howl (thanks to satsuma for that phrase!). Foreign Affairs is also the first album that makes me picture the eyes closed/eyebrows raised/can’t lose face Waits often pulls while singing, though I’m sure it was there in the earlier albums (if not the recording, then definitely the live performances). Then, with Heartattack and Vine (1980), suddenly we are in electric guitar-based R&B territory, the sound seeming to move from a bar corner to a proper stage. But, perhaps most importantly, we catch a completely smitten Waits singing a seemingly non-Waits lyric – “sha-la-la-la-la-la”, in “Jersey Girl”. The girl? One Kathleen Brennan, who would impact Waits and his sound immensely, from one wonderful day forward.

    Waits wrote Heartattack and Vine while taking a break from writing the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1981), on the set of which he re-met Brennan, who he had first met while filming Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley (1978; Waits’ film debut). It apparently was love at second sight – the two were engaged within a week, and married the month before Heartattack was released.

    Waits has apparently said of Brennan that he didn’t just marry a wife, but also a record collection. Brennan introduced Waits to a bunch of new music, perhaps the most influential to his own evolving sound being Captain Beefheart and composer Harry Partch (who made his own instruments). With the life changes and Brennan’s encouragement, Waits also changed managers and producers – to himself and Brennan – and used the opportunity to, essentially, reinvent himself. Thus we have the absolute masterpiece that is Swordfishtrombones (1983), the first of Waits’ experimental era – the first Waits’ album to not feature saxophone, the first to have marimba (and various eclectic instruments), and, really, the first to have music that finally seems to live in the same postal code as the vocals. It’s weird, it’s whacky, it’s what most now likely consider pure Waits. It should be in every record collection, and should have it’s own full blog (like, an entire blog, not just a blog post) dissecting every second of it. Also, it was released on my day of birth, which gives it extra bonus points from me.

    Swordfishtrombones is the beginning of a loose trilogy of albums, the second of which is technically the subject of this spotlight (and our first album in today’s listening schedule): Rain Dogs. While continuing along the lines of Swordfishtrombones plus adding in the plethora of new influences and experiences that came with Waits’ and Brennan’s move to New York City (including Waits’ growing filmography), Rain Dogs also brings back in all the best things of the pre-Brennan albums (including some of that country rock twang from Closing Time, in “Blind Love”). It’s a ‘best of’ bag of Waits’ tricks, if you will, but notably less whisky-soaked. The result is a couple of surprisingly rather radio-friendly tunes (well, alternative radio, at any rate) including “Hang Down Your Head” (the first tune co-written with Brennan), as well as some cinema-friendly tunes, with songs from the album bookending the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law (1986; which Waits also starred in). And, another super duper (not really) important thing that really stands out, to me at least: end-of-song FADE OUTS. Perhaps they were in previous Waits albums, but for some reason these are the first I recall, enough to point out, lol. Anyway, and again, it deserves more than the cursory glance here, so be sure to give it a few spins and gather your own thoughts about it. Whether it was the fade outs, the film cred, or just people knowing what’s what, it’s not hard to see why this album made and continues to make a number of lists, including the “official” 1001 list.

    Following Rain Dogs, we get Franks Wild Years (1987), the last in the trilogy and thus another album in a similar vein. This album continues the story of one Frank, first seen in Swordfishtrombones‘ track of the same name (well, with the grammatically correct apostrophe), via songs first written (some co-written by Brennan) for a play. The real standout for me on this album – and, as far as I can remember, my first introduction to Waits – is the spectacular “Way Down in the Hole”, which was used/covered for The Wire‘s theme song. My advice? Get the entire trilogy and listen to all of them in a row, a few times over, as their own separate #TomWaitsAWeek. And then, for bonus marks, check out all the cover versions done for The Wire, if you haven’t already. For myself, I haven’t yet devoted enough time to Franks, so I’m planning on getting a lot more spins in soon.

    The last two albums on our listening schedule today carry on the experimentation of the Sword/Rain/Franks trilogy, albeit with different vibes. On Bone Machine (1992), perhaps it’s because of the title but I can’t help but hear some Pixies vibes, also some Leonard Cohen vibes (“Black Wings”) – in other words, there’s a LOT of different stuff going on in this one. Again, it deserves it’s own spotlight, and more than a quick spin. And then, The Black Rider (1993) is another play-to-album collection of songs, the play in question co-written by none other than William S. Burroughs and directed by Robert Wilson (perhaps known by many as Philip Glass’ collaborator on Einstein on the Beach). Waits will very soon again collaborate with Wilson on what becomes Alice and Blood Money (both 2002).

    Alice is the third and last Waits album we have in The List, and is one of the albums in tomorrow’s listening schedule (along with Blood Money). Because I’m only human I won’t have its spotlight ready prior to listening, but we’ll meet back here on Friday to discuss it, and cap off our #TomWaitsAWeek.

    Until then, I hope you don’t have to wait to listen to more Waits!

    [1]Apologies for the wishy-washy data, but I only tracked the first time an album was submitted, so this is going off my shoddy memory of how many times I replied “already added!” to people. I do remember with certainty that SpaceAce was one of those people, btw.
    [2]For those wanting to listen through the discography with us, here’s what is left in the schedule, of studio albums plus the Orphans box set (any live/soundtrack/etc. albums are extracurricular!): Wednesday – Rain Dogs, Franks Wild Years, Bone Machine, The Black Rider; Thursday – Mule Variations, Alice, Blood Money, Real Gone; Friday – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Bad as Me

    #1001OtherAlbums #1980s #experimental #experimentalRock #KathleenBrennan #ListenToThis #musicDiscovery #Musodon #TomWaits #TomWaitsAWeek

    #1001otheralbums #1980s #experimental #experimentalrock #kathleenbrennan #listentothis
  35. 1001 Other Albums @[email protected] ·

    TomWaitsAWeek | Tom Waits – Rain Dogs (1985, US)

    Today’s spotlight is on number 315 on The List, and the second in our #TomWaitsAWeek feature. Fun fact: Rain Dogs album was the most repeated submission when we were first compiling The List, with something like 5+ people submitting it at the same time;1 CliftonR was the first to get in their vote, so they get the attribution. I’m going to apologize right off that bat to those 5+ people and anyone else who knows how great this album is – while Rain Dogs absolutely deserves its own dedicated and lengthy spotlight, it essentially shares this one with the 4 albums that preceded it and the 3 that came after. For that matter, each album mentioned here deserves its own spotlight. Alas, more Waits is better than less, so let’s not wait any longer and dig in…

    Yesterday’s listening schedule2 for #TomWaitsAWeek included some huge shifts in Tom Waits’ sound and life. Foreign Affairs (1977) and Blue Valentine (1978) are perhaps not too far away from the preceding Small Change, albeit with amped up cinematic vibes, more strings, the first swapping of the piano for an electric guitar, and the first appearance (in “$29.00”) of what will become Waits’ signature drunk howl (thanks to satsuma for that phrase!). Foreign Affairs is also the first album that makes me picture the eyes closed/eyebrows raised/can’t lose face Waits often pulls while singing, though I’m sure it was there in the earlier albums (if not the recording, then definitely the live performances). Then, with Heartattack and Vine (1980), suddenly we are in electric guitar-based R&B territory, the sound seeming to move from a bar corner to a proper stage. But, perhaps most importantly, we catch a completely smitten Waits singing a seemingly non-Waits lyric – “sha-la-la-la-la-la”, in “Jersey Girl”. The girl? One Kathleen Brennan, who would impact Waits and his sound immensely, from one wonderful day forward.

    Waits wrote Heartattack and Vine while taking a break from writing the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1981), on the set of which he re-met Brennan, who he had first met while filming Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley (1978; Waits’ film debut). It apparently was love at second sight – the two were engaged within a week, and married the month before Heartattack was released.

    Waits has apparently said of Brennan that he didn’t just marry a wife, but also a record collection. Brennan introduced Waits to a bunch of new music, perhaps the most influential to his own evolving sound being Captain Beefheart and composer Harry Partch (who made his own instruments). With the life changes and Brennan’s encouragement, Waits also changed managers and producers – to himself and Brennan – and used the opportunity to, essentially, reinvent himself. Thus we have the absolute masterpiece that is Swordfishtrombones (1983), the first of Waits’ experimental era – the first Waits’ album to not feature saxophone, the first to have marimba (and various eclectic instruments), and, really, the first to have music that finally seems to live in the same postal code as the vocals. It’s weird, it’s whacky, it’s what most now likely consider pure Waits. It should be in every record collection, and should have it’s own full blog (like, an entire blog, not just a blog post) dissecting every second of it. Also, it was released on my day of birth, which gives it extra bonus points from me.

    Swordfishtrombones is the beginning of a loose trilogy of albums, the second of which is technically the subject of this spotlight (and our first album in today’s listening schedule): Rain Dogs. While continuing along the lines of Swordfishtrombones plus adding in the plethora of new influences and experiences that came with Waits’ and Brennan’s move to New York City (including Waits’ growing filmography), Rain Dogs also brings back in all the best things of the pre-Brennan albums (including some of that country rock twang from Closing Time, in “Blind Love”). It’s a ‘best of’ bag of Waits’ tricks, if you will, minus the whisky. The result is a couple of surprisingly rather radio-friendly tunes (well, alternative radio, at any rate) including “Hang Down Your Head” (the first tune co-written with Brennan), as well as some cinema-friendly tunes, with songs from the album bookending the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law (1986; which Waits also starred in). And, another super duper (not really) important thing that really stands out, to me at least: end-of-song FADE OUTS. Perhaps they were in previous Waits albums, but for some reason these are the first I recall, enough to point out, lol. Anyway, and again, it deserves more than the cursory glance here, so be sure to give it a few spins and gather your own thoughts about it. Whether it was the fadeouts, the film cred, or just people knowing what’s what, it’s not hard to see why this album made and continues to make a number of lists, including the “official” 1001 list.

    Following Rain Dogs, we get Franks Wild Years (1987), the last in the trilogy and thus another album in a similar vein. This album continues the story of one Frank, first seen in Swordfishtrombones‘ track of the same name (well, with the grammatically correct apostrophe), via songs first written (some co-written by Brennan) for a play. The real standout for me on this album – and, as far as I can remember, my first introduction to Waits – is the spectacular “Way Down in the Hole”, which was used/covered for The Wire‘s theme song. My advice? Get the entire trilogy and listen to all of them in a row, a few times over, as their own separate #TomWaitsAWeek. And then, for bonus marks, check out all the cover versions done for The Wire, if you haven’t already. For myself, I haven’t yet devoted enough time to this Franks, so I’m planning on getting a lot more spins in soon.

    The last two albums on our listening schedule today carry on the experimentation of the Sword/Rain/Franks trilogy, albeit with different vibes. On Bone Machine (1992), perhaps it’s because of the title but I can’t help but hear some Pixies vibes, also some Leonard Cohen vibes (“Black Wings”) – in other words, there’s a LOT of different stuff going on in this one. Again, it deserves it’s own spotlight, and more than a quick spin. And then, The Black Rider (1993) is another play-to-album collection of songs, the play in question co-written by none other than William S. Burroughs and directed by Robert Wilson (perhaps known by many as Philip Glass’ collaborator on Einstein on the Beach). Waits will very soon again collaborate with Wilson on what becomes two of the albums in tomorrow’s listening schedule, Alice and Blood Money (both 2002).

    Alice is part of tomorrow’s listening schedule, and is the third Waits album we have in The List. Because I’m only human I won’t have its spotlight ready prior to listening, but we’ll meet back here on Friday to discuss it, and cap off our #TomWaitsAWeek.

    Until then, I hope you don’t have to wait to listen to more Waits!

    1Apologies for the wishy-washy data, but I only tracked the first time an album was submitted, so this is going off my shoddy memory of how many times I replied “already added!” to people. I do remember with certainty that SpaceAce was one of those people, btw.
    2For those wanting to listen through the discography with us, here’s what is left in the schedule, of studio albums plus the Orphans box set (any live/soundtrack/etc. albums are extracurricular!): Wednesday – Rain Dogs, Franks Wild Years, Bone Machine, The Black Rider; Thursday – Mule Variations, Alice, Blood Money, Real Gone; Friday – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Bad as Me

    #1001OtherAlbums #1980s #experimental #experimentalRock #KathleenBrennan #ListenToThis #musicDiscovery #Musodon #TomWaits #TomWaitsAWeek

    #1001otheralbums #1980s #experimental #experimentalrock #kathleenbrennan #listentothis
  36. 1001 Other Albums @[email protected] ·

    TomWaitsAWeek | Tom Waits – Rain Dogs (1985, US)

    Today’s spotlight is on number 315 on The List, and the second in our #TomWaitsAWeek feature. Fun fact: Rain Dogs album was the most repeated submission when we were first compiling The List, with something like 5+ people submitting it at the same time;[1] CliftonR was the first to get in their vote, so they get the attribution. I’m going to apologize right off that bat to those 5+ people and anyone else who knows how great this album is – while Rain Dogs absolutely deserves its own dedicated and lengthy spotlight, it essentially shares this one with the 4 albums that preceded it and the 3 that came after. For that matter, each album mentioned here deserves its own spotlight. Alas, more Waits is better than less, so let’s not wait any longer and dig in…

    Yesterday’s listening schedule[2] for #TomWaitsAWeek included some huge shifts in Tom Waits’ sound and life. Foreign Affairs (1977) and Blue Valentine (1978) are perhaps not too far away from the preceding Small Change, albeit with amped up cinematic vibes, more strings, the first swapping of the piano for an electric guitar, and the first appearance (in “$29.00”) of what will become Waits’ signature drunk howl (thanks to satsuma for that phrase!). Foreign Affairs is also the first album that makes me picture the eyes closed/eyebrows raised/can’t lose face Waits often pulls while singing, though I’m sure it was there in the earlier albums (if not the recording, then definitely the live performances). Then, with Heartattack and Vine (1980), suddenly we are in electric guitar-based R&B territory, the sound seeming to move from a bar corner to a proper stage. But, perhaps most importantly, we catch a completely smitten Waits singing a seemingly non-Waits lyric – “sha-la-la-la-la-la”, in “Jersey Girl”. The girl? One Kathleen Brennan, who would impact Waits and his sound immensely, from one wonderful day forward.

    Waits wrote Heartattack and Vine while taking a break from writing the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1981), on the set of which he re-met Brennan, who he had first met while filming Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley (1978; Waits’ film debut). It apparently was love at second sight – the two were engaged within a week, and married the month before Heartattack was released.

    Waits has apparently said of Brennan that he didn’t just marry a wife, but also a record collection. Brennan introduced Waits to a bunch of new music, perhaps the most influential to his own evolving sound being Captain Beefheart and composer Harry Partch (who made his own instruments). With the life changes and Brennan’s encouragement, Waits also changed managers and producers – to himself and Brennan – and used the opportunity to, essentially, reinvent himself. Thus we have the absolute masterpiece that is Swordfishtrombones (1983), the first of Waits’ experimental era – the first Waits’ album to not feature saxophone, the first to have marimba (and various eclectic instruments), and, really, the first to have music that finally seems to live in the same postal code as the vocals. It’s weird, it’s whacky, it’s what most now likely consider pure Waits. It should be in every record collection, and should have it’s own full blog (like, an entire blog, not just a blog post) dissecting every second of it. Also, it was released on my day of birth, which gives it extra bonus points from me.

    Swordfishtrombones is the beginning of a loose trilogy of albums, the second of which is technically the subject of this spotlight (and our first album in today’s listening schedule): Rain Dogs. While continuing along the lines of Swordfishtrombones plus adding in the plethora of new influences and experiences that came with Waits’ and Brennan’s move to New York City (including Waits’ growing filmography), Rain Dogs also brings back in all the best things of the pre-Brennan albums (including some of that country rock twang from Closing Time, in “Blind Love”). It’s a ‘best of’ bag of Waits’ tricks, if you will, but notably less whisky-soaked. The result is a couple of surprisingly rather radio-friendly tunes (well, alternative radio, at any rate) including “Hang Down Your Head” (the first tune co-written with Brennan), as well as some cinema-friendly tunes, with songs from the album bookending the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law (1986; which Waits also starred in). And, another super duper (not really) important thing that really stands out, to me at least: end-of-song FADE OUTS. Perhaps they were in previous Waits albums, but for some reason these are the first I recall, enough to point out, lol. Anyway, and again, it deserves more than the cursory glance here, so be sure to give it a few spins and gather your own thoughts about it. Whether it was the fade outs, the film cred, or just people knowing what’s what, it’s not hard to see why this album made and continues to make a number of lists, including the “official” 1001 list.

    Following Rain Dogs, we get Franks Wild Years (1987), the last in the trilogy and thus another album in a similar vein. This album continues the story of one Frank, first seen in Swordfishtrombones‘ track of the same name (well, with the grammatically correct apostrophe), via songs first written (some co-written by Brennan) for a play. The real standout for me on this album – and, as far as I can remember, my first introduction to Waits – is the spectacular “Way Down in the Hole”, which was used/covered for The Wire‘s theme song. My advice? Get the entire trilogy and listen to all of them in a row, a few times over, as their own separate #TomWaitsAWeek. And then, for bonus marks, check out all the cover versions done for The Wire, if you haven’t already. For myself, I haven’t yet devoted enough time to Franks, so I’m planning on getting a lot more spins in soon.

    The last two albums on our listening schedule today carry on the experimentation of the Sword/Rain/Franks trilogy, albeit with different vibes. On Bone Machine (1992), perhaps it’s because of the title but I can’t help but hear some Pixies vibes, also some Leonard Cohen vibes (“Black Wings”) – in other words, there’s a LOT of different stuff going on in this one. Again, it deserves it’s own spotlight, and more than a quick spin. And then, The Black Rider (1993) is another play-to-album collection of songs, the play in question co-written by none other than William S. Burroughs and directed by Robert Wilson (perhaps known by many as Philip Glass’ collaborator on Einstein on the Beach). Waits will very soon again collaborate with Wilson on what becomes Alice and Blood Money (both 2002).

    Alice is the third and last Waits album we have in The List, and is one of the albums in tomorrow’s listening schedule (along with Blood Money). Because I’m only human I won’t have its spotlight ready prior to listening, but we’ll meet back here on Friday to discuss it, and cap off our #TomWaitsAWeek.

    Until then, I hope you don’t have to wait to listen to more Waits!

    [1]Apologies for the wishy-washy data, but I only tracked the first time an album was submitted, so this is going off my shoddy memory of how many times I replied “already added!” to people. I do remember with certainty that SpaceAce was one of those people, btw.
    [2]For those wanting to listen through the discography with us, here’s what is left in the schedule, of studio albums plus the Orphans box set (any live/soundtrack/etc. albums are extracurricular!): Wednesday – Rain Dogs, Franks Wild Years, Bone Machine, The Black Rider; Thursday – Mule Variations, Alice, Blood Money, Real Gone; Friday – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Bad as Me

    #1001OtherAlbums #1980s #experimental #experimentalRock #KathleenBrennan #ListenToThis #musicDiscovery #Musodon #TomWaits #TomWaitsAWeek

    #tomwaitsaweek #tomwaits #musodon #musicdiscovery #listentothis #kathleenbrennan
  37. 1001 Other Albums @[email protected] ·

    TomWaitsAWeek | Tom Waits – Rain Dogs (1985, US)

    Today’s spotlight is on number 315 on The List, and the second in our #TomWaitsAWeek feature. Fun fact: Rain Dogs album was the most repeated submission when we were first compiling The List, with something like 5+ people submitting it at the same time;1 CliftonR was the first to get in their vote, so they get the attribution. I’m going to apologize right off that bat to those 5+ people and anyone else who knows how great this album is – while Rain Dogs absolutely deserves its own dedicated and lengthy spotlight, it essentially shares this one with the 4 albums that preceded it and the 3 that came after. For that matter, each album mentioned here deserves its own spotlight. Alas, more Waits is better than less, so let’s not wait any longer and dig in…

    Yesterday’s listening schedule2 for #TomWaitsAWeek included some huge shifts in Tom Waits’ sound and life. Foreign Affairs (1977) and Blue Valentine (1978) are perhaps not too far away from the preceding Small Change, albeit with amped up cinematic vibes, more strings, the first swapping of the piano for an electric guitar, and the first appearance (in “$29.00”) of what will become Waits’ signature drunk howl (thanks to satsuma for that phrase!). Foreign Affairs is also the first album that makes me picture the eyes closed/eyebrows raised/can’t lose face Waits often pulls while singing, though I’m sure it was there in the earlier albums (if not the recording, then definitely the live performances). Then, with Heartattack and Vine (1980), suddenly we are in electric guitar-based R&B territory, the sound seeming to move from a bar corner to a proper stage. But, perhaps most importantly, we catch a completely smitten Waits singing a seemingly non-Waits lyric – “sha-la-la-la-la-la”, in “Jersey Girl”. The girl? One Kathleen Brennan, who would impact Waits and his sound immensely, from one wonderful day forward.

    Waits wrote Heartattack and Vine while taking a break from writing the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1981), on the set of which he re-met Brennan, who he had first met while filming Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley (1978; Waits’ film debut). It apparently was love at second sight – the two were engaged within a week, and married the month before Heartattack was released.

    Waits has apparently said of Brennan that he didn’t just marry a wife, but also a record collection. Brennan introduced Waits to a bunch of new music, perhaps the most influential to his own evolving sound being Captain Beefheart and composer Harry Partch (who made his own instruments). With the life changes and Brennan’s encouragement, Waits also changed managers and producers – to himself and Brennan – and used the opportunity to, essentially, reinvent himself. Thus we have the absolute masterpiece that is Swordfishtrombones (1983), the first of Waits’ experimental era – the first Waits’ album to not feature saxophone, the first to have marimba (and various eclectic instruments), and, really, the first to have music that finally seems to live in the same postal code as the vocals. It’s weird, it’s whacky, it’s what most now likely consider pure Waits. It should be in every record collection, and should have it’s own full blog (like, an entire blog, not just a blog post) dissecting every second of it. Also, it was released on my day of birth, which gives it extra bonus points from me.

    Swordfishtrombones is the beginning of a loose trilogy of albums, the second of which is technically the subject of this spotlight (and our first album in today’s listening schedule): Rain Dogs. While continuing along the lines of Swordfishtrombones plus adding in the plethora of new influences and experiences that came with Waits’ and Brennan’s move to New York City (including Waits’ growing filmography), Rain Dogs also brings back in all the best things of the pre-Brennan albums (including some of that country rock twang from Closing Time, in “Blind Love”). It’s a ‘best of’ bag of Waits’ tricks, if you will, minus the whisky. The result is a couple of surprisingly rather radio-friendly tunes (well, alternative radio, at any rate) including “Hang Down Your Head” (the first tune co-written with Brennan), as well as some cinema-friendly tunes, with songs from the album bookending the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law (1986; which Waits also starred in). And, another super duper (not really) important thing that really stands out, to me at least: end-of-song FADE OUTS. Perhaps they were in previous Waits albums, but for some reason these are the first I recall, enough to point out, lol. Anyway, and again, it deserves more than the cursory glance here, so be sure to give it a few spins and gather your own thoughts about it. Whether it was the fadeouts, the film cred, or just people knowing what’s what, it’s not hard to see why this album made and continues to make a number of lists, including the “official” 1001 list.

    Following Rain Dogs, we get Franks Wild Years (1987), the last in the trilogy and thus another album in a similar vein. This album continues the story of one Frank, first seen in Swordfishtrombones‘ track of the same name (well, with the grammatically correct apostrophe), via songs first written (some co-written by Brennan) for a play. The real standout for me on this album – and, as far as I can remember, my first introduction to Waits – is the spectacular “Way Down in the Hole”, which was used/covered for The Wire‘s theme song. My advice? Get the entire trilogy and listen to all of them in a row, a few times over, as their own separate #TomWaitsAWeek. And then, for bonus marks, check out all the cover versions done for The Wire, if you haven’t already. For myself, I haven’t yet devoted enough time to this Franks, so I’m planning on getting a lot more spins in soon.

    The last two albums on our listening schedule today carry on the experimentation of the Sword/Rain/Franks trilogy, albeit with different vibes. On Bone Machine (1992), perhaps it’s because of the title but I can’t help but hear some Pixies vibes, also some Leonard Cohen vibes (“Black Wings”) – in other words, there’s a LOT of different stuff going on in this one. Again, it deserves it’s own spotlight, and more than a quick spin. And then, The Black Rider (1993) is another play-to-album collection of songs, the play in question co-written by none other than William S. Burroughs and directed by Robert Wilson (perhaps known by many as Philip Glass’ collaborator on Einstein on the Beach). Waits will very soon again collaborate with Wilson on what becomes two of the albums in tomorrow’s listening schedule, Alice and Blood Money (both 2002).

    Alice is part of tomorrow’s listening schedule, and is the third Waits album we have in The List. Because I’m only human I won’t have its spotlight ready prior to listening, but we’ll meet back here on Friday to discuss it, and cap off our #TomWaitsAWeek.

    Until then, I hope you don’t have to wait to listen to more Waits!

    1Apologies for the wishy-washy data, but I only tracked the first time an album was submitted, so this is going off my shoddy memory of how many times I replied “already added!” to people. I do remember with certainty that SpaceAce was one of those people, btw.
    2For those wanting to listen through the discography with us, here’s what is left in the schedule, of studio albums plus the Orphans box set (any live/soundtrack/etc. albums are extracurricular!): Wednesday – Rain Dogs, Franks Wild Years, Bone Machine, The Black Rider; Thursday – Mule Variations, Alice, Blood Money, Real Gone; Friday – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Bad as Me

    #1001OtherAlbums #1980s #experimental #experimentalRock #KathleenBrennan #ListenToThis #musicDiscovery #Musodon #TomWaits #TomWaitsAWeek

    #1001otheralbums #1980s #experimental #experimentalrock #kathleenbrennan #listentothis