Tom Waits

Thomas Alan Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by one critic as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car." With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock styles such as blues, jazz, and Vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music, Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona.

Lyrically, Waits' songs are known for atmospheric portrayals of bizarre, seedy characters and places, although he has also shown a penchant for more conventional and touching ballads. He has a cult following and has influenced subsequent songwriters, despite having little radio or music video support. His songs are best known to the general public in the form of cover versions by more visible artists-for example "Jersey Girl" performed by Bruce Springsteen, and "Downtown Train" performed by Rod Stewart. Although Waits's albums have met with mixed commercial success in his native United States, they have occasionally achieved gold album sales status in other countries. He has been nominated for a number of major music awards, and has won Grammy Awards for two albums.

Waits has also worked as a composer for movies and musical plays and as a supporting actor in films, including The Fisher King and Bram Stoker's Dracula. He has been nominated for an Academy Award for his soundtrack work.

When Tom Waits claims he doesn't know why he called this three-CD set Orphans, he's being cagey. Orphans obviously began as an outtakes collection -- unreleased work tapes plus old soundtrack, tribute and benefit tracks. Only then, Waits, painfully aware that odds-and-sods projects were lame, decided to fill in some blanks with new songs, couldn't resist rerecording others and ended up with a definitive album. Each disc has its own subtitle: Brawlers for rock, Bawlers for ballads and Bastards for weirdness. Although the promo advertises "56 Songs. 30 New Recordings," only fourteen can be readily found on other albums.
Brawlers is Waits blues a la Mule Variations, only broader. His drummer son Casey's basic thump on "Low Down" reminds the ear that Waits generally bellows over pretty intricate beats. He was on the dreamy New Orleans lilt of "Sea of Love" back in 1988, and though Tito Puente might not think so, "Fish in the Jailhouse" is indeed a mambo. Of course, there's also the first of two Ramones covers, and, fitting nowhere but so good they'd fit anywhere, the mandolin-tinged "Bottom of the World" and the unrhymed, seven-minute "Road to Peace," a portrayal of a Palestinian terrorist that blinks even less than Springsteen's.

Bawlers is Waits' bread and butter -- professional sentimentalists love the way he mauls slow ones, and six of the soundtrack tunes are here, from Big Bad Love, Pollock and Shrek 2. Waits can get grotesquely goopy when he makes nice, but the new "Tell It to Me" and the recycled "The Fall of Troy" are genre classics right up there with Waits' bumptious claims on "Young at Heart" and "Goodnight Irene." Bastards is messier musically, but its six spoken-word pieces are long overdue for anyone who's guffawed at the shaggy-dog monologues Waits rolls out at shows. In "The Pontiac," a dad reminisces about his cars, the mad entomology lecture "Army Ants" isn't far behind, and "First Kiss" explains something we've always wondered. Waits reached that romantic milestone with a trailer crone who made up her own language, wore rubber boots and could fix anything with string. Just like our Tom.

ROBERT CHRISTGAU

It's dreamy weather we're on
You waved your crooked wand
Along an icy pond with a frozen moon
A murder of silhouette crows I saw
And the tears on my face
And the skates on the pond
They spell Alice

I disappear in your name
But you must wait for me
Somewhere across the sea
There's a wreck of a ship
Your hair is like meadow grass on the tide
And the raindrops on my window
And the ice in my drink
Baby all I can think of is Alice

Arithmetic arithmetock
Turn the hands back on the clock
How does the ocean rock the boat?
How did the razor find my throat?
The only strings that hold me here
Are tangled up around the pier

And so a secret kiss
Brings madness with the bliss
And I will think of this
When I'm dead in my grave
Set me adrift and I'm lost over there
And I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice

And so a secret kiss
Brings madness with the bliss
And I will think of this
When I'm dead in my grave
Set me adrift and I'm lost over there
And I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice
There's only Alice

Inside a broken clock
Splashing the wine
With all the Rain Dogs
Taxi, we'd rather walk.
Huddle a doorway with the Rain Dogs
For i am a Rain Dog, too.

Chorus

Oh, how we danced and we swallowed the night
For it was all ripe for dreamin
Oh, how we danced away
All of the lights
We've always been out of our minds.

The Rum pours strong and thin
Beat out the dustman
With the Rain Dogs
Aboard a shipwreck train
Give my umbrella to the Rain Dogs
For I am a Rain Dog, too.

Oh, how we danced with the
Rose of Tralee
Her long hair black as a raven
Oh, how we danced and you
Whispered to me
You'll never be going back home,
You'll never be going back home.

Tom Waits is the Bob Dylan for people who think Dylan's voice is too pretty. The singer/songwriter, whose voice is usually more of a howl, wail, snarl, growl, or cackle than a "sing," has made a career out of contorting older or even arcane forms of music - slop-bucket blues-jams, lounge swing, vaudeville - into his unique gravel-throated act. It is, many times, just that: an act.

Waits has always been, and most likely will always be, excessively theatrical. Not in that Queen or Styx kind of way, but the fedora-wearing pianist has always cultivated a character-driven performance, relying more on a story-telling persona than bombast and costumes.

His off-kilter stage antics have garnered Waits an obsessive following, on the level of the Grateful Dead, Radiohead, or Phish, leaving behind him a trail of cigarette-smoking fanatics known as Rain Dogs - and, minus the smoke, I'm included in that soaking mass.

His latest offering (due out Nov. 21), Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, is just for the mutts and strays who nip at Waits' heels.

Billed as "over three hours" of music from the "one and only Tom Waits," the collection boasts three discs divided up into Brawlers (mostly dirty-blues riffs), Bawlers (mostly ballads), and Bastards (the odds 'n' ends: eerie children's songs and spoken-word poetry).

Orphans is a collection of B-sides, rarities, and unreleased material from Waits' time at Anti-Records. Beginning with the pops and scratches indicative of classic blues-struts, left over from 1999's Mule Variations, and ranging up to the surprising "beat-boxing" (an influence from Waits' beat-maker son, Brian) on 2004's Real Gone, there's a little bit of everything from his seven-year tenure on the Epitaph offshoot.

Most collections of this nature are overly long and self-indulgent, and Orphans suffers from the limitations of its genre. Of course, there are some truly delicious gems on the compilation ("Bottom of the World" and "Never Let Go"), but there are too many clunkers or interesting failures (the generic outline of the conflict in the Gaza Strip in "Road to Peace" falls just a little short - but is more than admirable).
Continued...

I have heard buzz that Scarlett Johansson is planning on recording an album of Tom Waits covers. I haven't been able to uncover what songs she'll be singing or any details for that matter, but here's a quick blurb from Rolling Stones Magazine:

Leave it to Scarlett Johansson to do something all the other It girls are doing, except better. Johansson is apparently planning to record her debut album, Scarlett Sings Tom Waits, this winter. The record will, you know, consist of Waits material sung by Ms. Johansson. Scott Storch will be producing of course. Just kidding. Actually it's not entirely clear who Johansson will be collaborating with on this project.

This isn't the first time the pout-y hipster dream girl has been paired with an older icon; Bob Dylan featured Johansson in his ethereal, maudlin video for "When the Deal Goes Down," and then there was the seriously spark-filled martini-sharing sessions between Johansson and Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. This is the first time Johansson has put her heart on her sleeve re: her admiration for one of those gruff, aged iconic men, as opposed to the other way around. The best part is that there isn't even a cringe factor here. Actress plus recording contract usually equals completely mortifying disaster, but we have this weird faith that she can pull it off. Can she?

-- Elizabeth Goodman