Tom Waits: A Desperate Voice For Desperate Times

You can hear the new Tom Waits album in its entirety on NPR for the next few days - if you are a Tom Waits fan, this is a can't miss opportunity to hear the new material - his first studio album in seven years (and his 17th overall).

You can listen to the brief review of the album here:

Tom Waits: A Desperate Voice For Desperate Times

by WILL HERMES

Listen Now 

All Things Considered

[4 min 7 sec] 

October 26, 2011

Tom Waits generally sings like a psychotic carnival barker or a drunken lounge crooner. And I really mean that as a compliment.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, that voice. Pushed to extremes like the characters in his songs, his voice is an exaggeration full of truth. He's a singer of blues sentiment like Screamin' Jay Hawkins or Howlin' Wolf orRadiohead's Thom Yorke. His latest album is called Bad As Me, and the songs on it sound truer than ever — partly because Waits' songwriting and arranging are still extremely potent, and partly because his thematic desperation fits this particular moment in history like a ragged glove.

There's a line in one song about bailing out millionaires, and plenty of lyrics about money, jobs and the lack thereof. But Waits' music draws on the sweep of American history, early rock 'n' roll, old Mexican ballads and vaudeville-era pop, and you realize that these themes are depressingly eternal. Waits also sings about the power of love; about Eisenhower, Elvis and Wolfman Jack; about unlucky bodies piled up at the morgue; and, in a chilling song called "Hell Broke Luce," about a damaged soldier furiously trying to comprehend what he's lost, and the reasons why. 

At this point, Waits seems to be like Woody Allen: so respected by his peers that truly legendary artists come out for his projects. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones is featured in "Hell Broke Luce," along with Marc Ribot, an old Waits crony who might be America's greatest session guitarist at the moment. But Waits is an auteur just like Allen, and all the players ultimately serve his vision. Waits is an old pro singing slightly freakish songs — which, after a couple of listens, reveal themselves as not so freakish at all. Just human. 

Here is the text that goes with the page to hear the new album:

First Listen: Tom Waits, 'Bad As Me'

by STEPHEN THOMPSON

 





  

October 23, 2011

Everything about Tom Waits is a contradiction of one sort or another: He cuts an unknowable and even otherworldly figure, yet his songwriting can be tear-jerkingly humane. He's untethered to eras or trends, yet his sound and the characters he inhabits are distinctly American. And, for all the ways his image classifies him as a lone wolf, he's one of music's great collaborators, having spent the last three decades working closely with wife and songwriting partner Kathleen Brennan.

Waits, of course, is an expert at feeding the mystery surrounding his deeply weird but strangely accessible music; to interview the man is to be led into a catacomb of misdirection and non sequiturs. But on his 17th album Bad As Me, out Oct. 24, Waits and Brennan continue to craft songs marked by uncommon empathy. Waits' first all-new studio record in seven years, it toggles constantly between heartsick vulnerability and hell-bound defiance: He may attempt to wake the devil in the stomping title track, commiserating with a lover who's "the same kind of bad as me," but a few songs later, he's grimly mourning his status as "the last leaf on the tree" — a survivor, but a lonely one.

For Waits, vulnerability and defiance are two sides of the same coin anyway; just listen to the blisteringly ramshackle "Satisfied," in which satisfaction and death are practically interchangeable. He may exude fatalism in "Pay Me" — a punch-in-the-gut ballad in which he memorably sings, "All roads lead to the end of the world" — but his delivery is a carefully controlled mix of ruefulness and realism. For Waits, ugliness and beauty both find ways to persist against all opposition. But in the end, amid these 13 songs' furious clatter and gutter-level grime, beauty improbably wins out.