Tom Waits

[meatwad]

if you have soulseek, download his live vh1 storytellers set. he is such a master storyteller, it is one of the best live sets from him that i've heard.

and he is working on a new album right now. should be out in the fall, and hopefully he will play some shows. I know he never does, but i can always wish

[LostEraser]

Oh, kick ass! A Tom Waits forum. He's my favorite music artist of all time too! Cool, I'm not alone. Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Franks Wild Years are three of my favorite pieces of art of all time. The nocturnal world he creates - full of outcast drunks, protitutes, and hitchhikers, noen lit bars, and all nite diners - is the closest example I can think of to the kind of world I want to create with my films. If I we're to make a top ten list of all my heros it would probably be full of 9 filmmakers and Tom Waits. He's that important to me.

[The Obstruction]

While we are talking about Tom Waits, then lets take a look at some of the plays he has written music for : Woyzeck and The Black Rider.

I haven't seen Black Rider, but i saw Woyzeck because it opened in Copenhagen, and it was fantastic. The story is about a poor soldier who kills his wifes lover and the wife, because of jalousi, mayby not the most complicated thing.
But Tom waits music, which are on the BLOOD MONEY album transforms this simple story into a dark and intgiging story about two of the simpelst and complicated feelings love and jalousi.

Also the scenography are fantastci look at the IMG,it was a fantastic experience.

[cowboykurtis]

"closing time" is possibly my favorite album of all time -- on his later stuff i.e. rain dogs, he seemed to have departed from the "sound" of closing time. can anyone suggest any album of his , thats similar to closing time. its his earlier years before his voice was a complete gravel pit.

[RegularKarate]

"Closing time" is one of my least favorite Waits albums... Made before he established a real style or at least before he was able to excersize it.

Nighthawks is great, but Small Change is where it's at.  That's wher the music just really makes you want to cry drunkenly.

[Finn]

I just got his album, "Alice". It's probaby one if not the best album by Tom Waits.

[Ghostboy]

The only ones I have are Mule Variations, Black Rider, Small Change and Rain Dogs; Small Change is definitely my favorite of those, that and Mule Variations. Small Change is so steeped in eloquent misery that it makes you feel good to be depressed.

[coffeebeetle]

I'm so happy and relieved to know there are many Tom Waits fans.  My fave album:

[rustinglass]

"Closing time" is one of my least favorite Waits albums... Made before he established a real style or at least before he was able to excersize it.

Nighthawks is great, but Small Change is where it's at.  That's wher the music just really makes you want to cry drunkenly.

Come on,  man, closing time is great! That song "Martha" is one of my favourite songs, it's so fucking perfect.
Some people hate this album because they are so obsessed with his drunken roar of a voice that they don't like him when his voice was smooth. But that has nothing to do with why I love closing time, I like it cause it's got some of the most beautiful songs ever.

My favourite tom waits albums:

closing time
swordfish trombones
raindogs (kinda)
frank's wild years
alice.

[Pedro]

rain dogs and small change are tied for best.

[GoneSavage]

All fans should listen to meatwad, that Storytellers set is phenomenal.  It's hugely entertaining.  I sure wish that man would tour.

cowboy, there is a collection out of all his early stuff.  Just like coffeebeatle's preference, there is a collection of his early stuff as well.  Waits' career seems to work in cycles so having the collections is a nice way to introduce yourself to the different eras of songwriting and performance.

[kotte]

Misery is the River of the World.

Coolest and best song ever. From 'Blood Money' I think.

[kotte]

Been listening to it alot lately and I gotta say...Blood Money makes pain feel cool...

It's my favourite album right now.

Big Time is also great.

[meatwad]

Real Gone: Tom Waits has completed groundbreaking new CD for ANTI- Records--titled "Real Gone"-- out October 5th!
June 30, 2004

Academy Award nominated and Grammy Award winner, Tom Waits has been long considered one of music's most influential artists because he has continuously created music outside of fad or fashion. With REAL GONE, his off-road adventures are taken into the further beyond. Mixing and mashing: worlds both sonic and ethnic, musical traditions both new and old, and rhythms both mouth-made and sampled from his own instruments, Waits has reached a new pinnacle.

Written and produced by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, his wife and long-time collaborator, REAL GONE features 15 tracks of funk, Jamaican rock-steady, blues both urban and rural, rhythms and melodies both Latin and African and, for the first time, no piano.

The crash and collide of rhythms and genres within a song creates a hybrid unlike any music he has made before. The comic, funky, hip-hop/r&b inspired instructional dance number, "Metropolitan Glide" ("now show your teeth, bray like a calf/Then kill me with your machine gun laugh") and the sonic mayhem and nonsense rhyme ride to "Top of the Hill" (why don't you give me another cup of that soup?/Turn a Rolls Royce into a chicken coop") are both punctuated by a live band and turntable playing along to Waits' home recorded voice percussion.

Lyrically and musically the kinetic songs play against the haunting lull of the ballads. The epic, ominous and hypnotic Jamaican rock-steady groove of, "Sins of the Father," follows the dark trails of straying, passed on from generation to generation, from those at the top to those at the bottom and back around again, echoing a theme of the record.

While Waits has traditionally used his voice as an actor, inhabiting each song with a different vocal character, on numerous songs here, he also uses it as chugging, sputtering, wheezing syncopated engine of sound and rhythm that can explode like a string of sidewalk firecrackers or sound like the indecipherable incantations of a street corner shaman.

REAL GONE is a phrase that describes a place, a time beyond reach: a lost mind, a renegade leader, war love sublime, love lost, death, desire, escape. These are the themes of the record inspired by the giddy lust, high voltage, out of orbit times---a vertigo of splash and trash popular culture spinning alongside the gun to our head and the knife in our heart political times or as "Shake It" says, "I feel like a preacher waving a gun around."

REAL GONE is also an expression used by musicians to describe the experience of playing and losing yourself to the place where you can finally be found.

In a musical career that has spanned four decades and over 20 albums "Waits has," according the Los Angeles Times Robert Hilburn, "come through it all with a body of work that stamps him clearly as one of the most important figures of the modern pop era." REAL GONE adds more weight to that claim.

[Finn]

I just heard The Fall of Troy by Waits. It's amazing!