The Words and Music of Tom Waits (The Praeger Singer-Songwriter Collection)

The Words and Music of Sting

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In this comprehensive analysis, Kessel examines all of the many characters that have appeared throughout the course of Waits' musical career, from "Closing Time" to "Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards. He is not the sort of composer to chase after shiny red fire trucks to awesome blazing fires, but instead looks after the intangible dreams found dissipating in the last wisp of smoke from a cigarette, held in the weathered hands of a broken soul.

Here, author Corinne Kessel pursues Waits into this distinctly murky and unsettled atmosphere to address in particular Waits's enduring questions of reality, landscape, and identity. She is the Managing Producer for November Theatre, which produced the World English Premiere of the Tom Waits rock operetta, The Black Rider , which has toured across North America playing to sellout houses and garnering both rave reviews and numerous awards.

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Mar 04, Gregory Rothbard rated it liked it Shelves: rock-and-roll , books-one-can-annotate , read , los-angeles , books-with-spotify-trackings. I liked how she conceptualized the multiple styles of Tom waits into a coherent thesis. Lightweight highbrow thumbsucking This reads like a dissertation written under a weak advisor. I will read every word, watch any video, pay any price to feed my obsession.

The Words and Music of Tom Waits (The Praeger Singer-Songwriter Collection) - Corinne Kessel

But this is little more than an accumulation of admirations and thin observations delivered in mannered academese. It is overlong, underinformed, and somehow, despite the subject's utterly original vitality and richness, almost completely joyless Lightweight highbrow thumbsucking This reads like a dissertation written under a weak advisor. It is overlong, underinformed, and somehow, despite the subject's utterly original vitality and richness, almost completely joyless.

Jun 09, Patrick rated it did not like it. It turns out, some things don't warrant in-depth analysis. If you know his music, there's nothing to gain here. If you don't, you'll have no idea what she's talking about; you won't be reading it. But the real crime is Kessel writing like she's paid by the word. And the words she chooses are such gems as "lugubrious" and "hoboesque. View 2 comments. Apr 13, Andrew Ludke rated it liked it. We put drinks on it.

I put my coat on it. It just became an end table. While Alice, Blood Money, and The Black Rider are all more powerful works within their theatrical context, Real Gone is more than a soundtrack; it is the show. Moving away from the fussy, highly orchestrated, European parlor-style songs of Alice and Blood Money, Waits looked for something that was more organic, more instinctive, something that would compel you to move your body. While his new music is not a radical departure from the type of experi- mentation and techniques he has employed in the past, it does delve deeper into the territory of rhythm and tackles the same old problems with a new approach.

The album certainly has new sounds on it, but it is not filled with an eclectic menagerie of left-wing sound sources like some of his previous works. I started with these mouth rhythms, mak- ing my own cycles and playing along with them. Vintage microphones and tape were overloaded and instruments and musicians pushed to their limits or out of their comfort zones in order to achieve the distressed sound Waits wanted to capture.

The biggest thrill for him, however, was layering his sing- ing voice over the mouth percussion tracks he had made earlier. The voice seems to sound different when there are all these other vocal things around it. We got at a whole different energy in the rhythm too. Drums play a disoriented beat that randomly shifts and skips along, and all the tracks on the songs move along independently as if they were all part of a jumbled radio signal or the sonic collage of an outdoor carnival.

The sparsest song on the album, with only acous- tic guitar and vocals, it is the barbed subject matter of the lyrics that gives this achingly affecting song its heavy emotional impact. Yet, in order to maintain a lasting resonance for his songs, even though a certain president, a certain war, a certain headline may inspire them, Waits tries to keep his songwriting universal as well:.

Not to make things too personal. How do you photograph your driveway and make it seem like the road of life? You have to shape it, make it recognizable. Arguably the most rhythmic album Waits has released since Rain Dogs, Real Gone may also be the most inaccessible and dissonant. The characters that fill his songs are still familiar; brokenhearted, despondent, or murderous circus freaks, drifters, and dreamers.

We wanted Orphans to be like a shortwave radio show where the past is sequenced with the future, consisting of things you find on the ground, in this world and no world, or maybe the next world. Whatever you imagine that to be. Some of it is only a few months old, and some of it is like the dough you have left over so you can make another pie. Most of it was lost or buried under the house.

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Some of the tapes I had to pay ransom for to a plumber in Russia. You fall into the vat.

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We started to write just to climb out of the vat. Then you start listening and sorting and start writing in response to what you hear. And more recording. And then you get bit by a spider, go down the gopher hole, and make a whole different record. That was the process pretty much the last three years.

Brawlers starts the collection with a melange of rockabilly, riotous blues, Beefheartian-influenced yelps and yodels, and raw cranky rock. Bawlers veers toward bitter poison-soaked ballads, romantic songs of innocence and tender truths, and windswept, despairing laments of betrayal. Throughout all three discs, the theme of transience and hope for something better makes these Orphans all worthy of finding a home.

The wail of distant sirens and the burlesque saxophone section tear across the plains and the cornfields. I tried to be as equitable as possible. It is delicate and sweet, with string and horn counterpoint and cymbal swells, reminiscent of the parlor songs of Alice. The mellow trombone and the vocal duet near the end of the song only heighten the sentimental mood of the song. Dusted throughout the song is an icy violin tremolo that is simply chilling against the warmth of the rest of the instrumentation.

The mood is serene and filled with late-night despair enhanced by chime of lonely bells and a plucked banjo that appears halfway through the song. Fret noise from the acoustic guitar and the sounds of tapping feet add to the intimacy and emotional impact of the song. Hammond recording Wicked Grin, produced by Waits in Simple piano guides the long, flowing melody line of the tender vocals and provides the melancholic mood for the piece. Piano, clarinet, horns, guitar, and bass form a vignette of unadulterated eloquence and heartache. The lazy guitar and bass accompaniment and the expressive trumpet interlude are poignant in their pursuit of pure emotion.

This quirky cover closes the album with a soothing sentiment of a promise of a better tomorrow. The next disc in the triptych swerves toward the avant-garde, the idiosyn- cratic, the unclassifiable, and the errantly obscure. Bastards collects all of the songs that do not fit into the neat compartments of bluesy rock songs or bal- lads. It contains the songs that exist somewhere between his most theatrical works, his factoid-riddled spoken-word monologues, his demented covers, his acidic carnival atmospheres, and his a capella mouth percussion experi- ments.

Fully orchestrated with accordion, banjo, wheezing horns, muted brass, pizzicato strings, and clattering percussion, the song creates a dark and bone-rattling mood. His words pay homage to highway life and are layered overtop of the twang of the banjo, rollicking bass, scorching electric guitar, and amplified gritty harmonica. By thematically grouping his tunes, he ended up creating a set that caters to different factions of his diverse audience.

Over the years, Waits has drawn from a vast expanse of Ameri- can and European song idioms: gypsy, folk, jazz, blues, country, klezmer, polkas, waltzes, vaudeville, hip-hop, torch songs, spoken word, beat poetry, cabaret—all lacquered with a veneer that can only be labeled Waitsian. Production quality has always been a concern for Tom Waits. For the major- ity of his earlier albums, Waits recorded directly to analog two-track with no overdubbing in order to capture the aural quality of a live performance. As well, Waits wished to distance himself and his albums from the extensive and laborious studio production work that was characteristic of recordings pro- duced in Los Angeles at that time.

As an example of this desire, Nighthawks at the Diner was recorded live before a studio audience, giving this album a very intimate and authentic performance quality. I still feel compelled to bang on things in a room until I hear the sound I want, then the sound becomes your own, rather than something you can obtain for a nominal service charge. Waits is a musical craftsman and a master sto- ryteller with an uncompromising and eclectic vision.

His amazing lyrical gift allows his songs and characters to range from being literal to strangely surreal and symbolic and from dealing with harsh reality to experiencing the fantas- tical aberrations of the subconscious with equal facility and virtuosity.

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Musically, for Waits, this transformation and process was reflected in increasing experimentation and innovation with varied instrumentation, recording techniques, and textures, which resulted in sounds that were truly indicative of the characters and stories, contained within his songs. Amid all the obscure instruments and astounding arrangements conjured up by Waits, nothing is as remarkable as his voice, which can tirelessly leap from sutur- ing a tender love song to maniacal howling and screaming to his signature abrasive mouth rhythms.

His trademark gravel growl from his early albums developed over the years into a much more flexible instrument that he manipulated and specifically tailored to suit each individual song, character, or emotion. However, even more intriguing and distinctive than his vocal qualities is his highly cultivated narrative voice, which allows him to masterfully and convincingly assume a plethora of character roles throughout his music. His voice encapsulates and conveys simultaneously a deep human and inhuman expanse of emotion and reaches out to a general human condition.

As a musi- cian, Waits is very protective of his voice and what it is used to represent. He continually battles to keep himself and his music disassociated from the advertising industry, but, unfortunately, his innate ability to invoke mood and emotion makes his music highly appealing to the advertising industry. Part of the image that he has cultivated over the years includes an explicit aversion to product endorsement, and he is disdainful of musicians who allow their music to be used as advertising jingles.

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Comparing himself to others who do permit advertisers to make use of their music for commercial pur- poses, Waits remarked:. I find it unbelievable that they finally broke into the fascinating and lucrative world of advertising after years on the road, making albums and living in crummy apartments; finally advertising opened up and gave them a chance to do what they really wanted to do, which was salute and support a major American product, and have that name blinking over their head as they sing.

As Simon Frith indicates in Performing Rites:. Even when treating the voice as an instrument, in short, we come up against the fact that it stands for the person more directly than any other musical device. Running beneath them is a sawtooth snarl in the upper-midrange that sounds like paint being scraped from a ceiling.

Along with that comes a touch of battery-acid bray, then down low, in the bass range, the formless howl of a marine animal. Are you gonna be the only guy at the party with your shirt on inside out?

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