Tom Waits's new albums: a brief review and an appeal for opinions

Cafe Society
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A few of you know I am a huge, die-hard fan of Tom Waits. I’m aware that his voice and style are very much an acquired taste for a lot of people, and that some folks never really get there, but I loved his music from the first time I heard it. His voice is so…original, evocative, genuine. Anyhow.

When he released his last album, “Mule Variations,” I was convinced his career as an artist was over. It was an enjoyable, listenable, catchy album, but it had no focus, and it felt like a one-album-review of his entire career. It had the quirky characters, the bluesy/jazzy song, the wildly off-kilter carnival song, the junkyard-toy clanks and bangs song, the sensitive bar ballad, etc. It felt like he made an album of prototypical TYPES of Tom Waits songs, but not a unique album. I knew I’d continue buying his albums, but I assumed that after 30 long years of recording, his muse had finally expired of cirrhosis or lung cancer.

Last week, Tom Waits released two albums at the same time, “Alice,” and “Blood Money.” Both are musical scores for stage plays in which Waits had been involved.

“Alice” is about Lewis Carroll’s legendary preoccupation (some would say unhealthy sexual obsession) with Alice Lidell, the real-life inspiration for “Alice in Wonderland.” The entire album is focused and sad, extremely gentle at times, but with a sort of mad undercurrent that you would expect of a Victorian gentleman capable of dreaming up Wonderland. Tom Waits is an absolute genius at creating moods and writing lyrics. The first track sums up Carroll’s obsession by telling the story of a man who skates the name “Alice” into a frozen pond and retraces its lines until he falls through the ice. There’s a sad horror story of a song called “Poor Edward,” about a man that has a woman’s face on the back of his head, and she whispers to him “of things heard only in Hell.” She eventually badgers him into suicide, and Waits croaks out the final horror at last: “Some say he finally escaped her, but I knew her too well. She forced him into suicide so she could drag him to Hell.”

“Blood Money” is the score to an unfinished 1836 play called “Woyzeck” about a soldier who is the subject of medical experiments, is rejected by everyone he knows (including the prostitute he inadvisedly falls in love with,) and ends up murdering the girl and drowning himself. The play is not cheerful, obviously, and neither is the album. It’s wildly unkempt, woozily off-center. It’s ragged and feels like it’s right on the edge of madness, but Waits makes it amusingly misanthropic, if that’s possible.

Anyway, Tom Waits has reaffirmed my faith in him. Those who hate his music will undoubtedly hate this too, but fans (or folks who might be interested) should be satisfied. These are hardly the first albums he’s done that had theatrical connections (“Frank’s Wild Years” and “The Black Rider” are two more,) these were recorded and released at the same time, and they seem to mark yet another complete artistic change for Tom Waits.

Oh yeah, and I really like 'em.

What do you guys think?

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I’ve heard 'em both and won’t be hanging on to either. I found both a bit bland and boring. Redundant as well. While neither was as much of an incomprehensible mess as “The Black Rider” I found neither indispensible either. Of the two “Blood Money” is slightly more interesting. I LOVE “Mule Variations” and feel it is a very cohesive record. I also dig most of his early catalog. It seems just the Wilson-related works that don’t do it for me.

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I’m listening to “Alice” as I type. I hear a heavy Klezmer influence in many of the songs, and I love that.

I don’t have time to write a detailed review at this moment – I’ll just say that right now I rank “Alice” with “Rain Dogs,” and I see his movement away from rough/gruff jailhouse tales and towards melancholy folk songs (I’m not talking Joan Baez folk, either) as a Very Good Thing.

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listened to them both as Streaming Audio on the Anti site.

While I would love to make a joke about “Steaming Audio”, I liked them both. Alice was more to my liking than Blood Money. If I were to buy any, it’d only be Alice. I think Fish and Bird might be my fav on the album, but I only listened to the album twice.

Sorry, not the “learned” TW fan as you, but I enjoyed it a lot.

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Ah hell, Spritle. I’m not “learned.” I just decided a long time ago that almost anything Tom Waits does is worth watching closely, so I read for detail, you know?

I also really like “Fish & Bird,” btw.

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I got both albums about a week ago, and so far I have listened to Blood Money about 8x and Alice once. That’s not a comment on how much I like them, at all. I just like to really get a feel for a record before trying to digest another one by the same artist. Hopping back and forth would just blur them in my head. So, while Alice sounded good on the surface, I can’t really grade it yet.

Blood Money so far, is good. But me saying that a Tom Waits album is “good” is much like me saying that sex with Salma Hayek “might be kinda fun”. I don’t expect Waits’ albums to be just “good”, I expect them to be earth shattering. I expect them to be religious experiences. Blood Money has not delivered for me (yet?). I put it about on par with Mule Variations, which I also like, but not up to snuff as far as Waits goes.

I’ll revisit this thread when I have gotten my head around Alice

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Did you catch him on Letterman recently? After performing, he sat down to talk to Dave (a rarity for musicians) and he was quite humorous! He talked about being a volunteer driver for a school. He said he took a field trip to a music store and stood next to the guitars waiting to be recognized. Nothing. He took another trip to a dump and was immediately recognized by a dozen guys! Hilarious!

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Both albums seemed at first like a fairly undifferentiated mish-mash of Waits’ Devil’s drunken clown polka band mode, which is very good, but two albums of it at the same time seemed excessive. Death and damnation are pretty broad subjects, but he’d covered them before, and these songs came across as just stuff left over from his previous albums. In subsequent listenings, I began to feel he was actually going all over the map – he’s quoting Blake, he’s quoting Elliot, he’s invoking old Tin Pan Alley tunes.

Nearly every Tom Waits album rewards listening to it as an album, not just as a collection of songs. I mean, you sit down and don’t do anything but listen to the album. Well, maybe you read along with the liner notes. His songs tend to expound on themes. through various moods, and carry a strong sense of the dramatics and pacing of a sad narrative, much of it taking place between the lines and even in between the songs. That sounds pretty daft, but I’ve spoken to musicians who assured me that I’m not entirely crazy, and that this is the sort of thing composers do in fact set out to do.

Alice and Blood Money didn’t grab me the way so many Tom Waits albums did, but once they had my attention, I found them both not only sufficiently entertaining, but subtle and moving, affirming once more that Waits knows what he’s doing.

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Huge Tom Waits fan checking in. I picked up Alice and Blood Money a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only had the time to give Alice a serious listen. He’s definitely been influenced by Kurt Weill and German cabaret tunes and this suits the themes of Alice perfectly. Blood Money sounds like a dark raging slab, but I’ve had no time to really digest it.

I’ll definitely be listening to these for quite some time to come. BTW, I loved Mule Variations and think it’s his best album since Rain Dogs.

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Hey Ogre,

Thanks a million for that review! I’m a huge Waits fan and I wasn’t really all that satisfied by Mule Variations. It was a good album for sure but I like my Waits albums to have a bit more sharper edges in them, you know?

I can’t wait to get hold of the two new ones. If I can find this thread again I’ll post a review in it.

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Thanks, Johnny Angel. Very well said. That’s almost exactly how I feel about it.

I loved Bone Machine, but it was a collection of songs, not really an album with an overarching theme like Frank’s Wild Years or the new albums. I enjoyed every single one of the songs, but the extra reward of mining out the plots, the themes, and the connecting references was not there.

That’s why I like the new albums, especially Alice. They reward repeated listening with a few more connections every time. You start seeing the story within the songs (which work well as individual entities too,) and you begin to understand how the story is related to the album structure. For instance, upon repeated listening, it has become fairly obvious to me that “Fish and Bird” is the focus of Alice, because it seems to sum up Carroll’s (possibly) unrequited and hopeless longing. It’s almost as if it was placed there as a climax, with “Barcarolle” and “Fawn” serving as the denouement.

I enjoy seeing that level of craft and artistry, and Tom Waits is masterful at it.

Also, just a bit more history: the songs on Alice were originally written and performed for the play in 1992, about the same time as Bone Machine came out. I’m not entirely sure how old the songs on Blood Money are, but Alice was once considered Waits’s “great lost work” by some fans because the songs were never recorded during the play’s run.

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Blood Money

The music from the play “Woyzeck”. Woyzeck is a man scared from his experiences in the army. Society has turned its back on him and in a jealous rage he kills the prostitute girl that he has fallen in love with. Is this a perfect scenario for Waits or what?!

Given the storyline of the play the music could have been a bit more dark and hard but the sense of someone tormented is very much there. Really, Tom Waits is the only person who can get things like this across so clearly.

An example is the song Marie, the prostitute, is singing; “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”. The melody as such could easily have been a Louis Armstrongish happy-go-lucky jazz tune but there is an organ grinding underneath all the time and the tempo of the song is kind of sluggish. That makes all the difference. It is clear from the music that Maries life is not all that easy and you can picture her wandering the less fortunate quarters of the city while singing her songs. “Go out to the meadow; scare off all the crows It does nothing but rain here, and nothing will grow”. Combined with the happy jazz foundation it makes a desperate and urgent impression.

Waits uses the old carnival feeling a lot in order to get a feeling of madness (“Misery River”, “Starving In The Belly Of A Whale”) and instruments you don’t hear very often now days (marimba, oboe etc.). The lyrics are full of symbols and twisted nursery rhymes. “For want of a bird The sky was lost For want of a nail A shoe was lost For want of a life A knife was lost” (from Misery River). I really like these songs.

If you ask me Tom Waits is a hopeless romantic and between the darker parts there are some breathers on the record that are songs from Woyzeck to Marie expressing true love. Examples of this are the songs “The World Is Green” and “Coney Island Baby”. Despite Tom Waits fascination of the darker sides and the outcasts of society you can trust him to occasionally find small gems of beauty in it all. Just like finding a piece of jewellery in the junkyard.

The record is above average for Tom Waits and that’s saying something. I would not rate it as one of his best but it is very much worth your money. One thing that makes me annoyed though is that the songs aren’t put in the order as they appear in the play. Why? Well there are a lot of reasons I’m sure but it is a mistake in my opinion.