Tom Waits - Orphans news

StoneG82StoneG82 Posts: 806
edited October 2006 in Other Music
http://www.anti.com/catalog.php?id=69

BRAWLERS
01. Lie To Me
02. LowDown
03. 2:19
04. Fish In The Jailhouse
05. Bottom Of The World
06. Lucinda
07. Ain't Goin' Down To The Well
08. Lord I've Been Changed
09. Puttin' On The Dog
10. Road To Peace
11. All The Time
12. The Return Of Jackie and Judy
13. Walk Away
14. Sea Of Love
15. Buzz Fledderjohn
16. Rains On Me

BAWLERS
01. Bend Down The Branches
02. You Can Never Hold Back Spring
03. Long Way Home
04. Widow's Grove
05. Little Drop Of Poison
06. Shiny Things
07. World Keeps Turning
08. Tell It To Me
09. Never Let Go
10. Fannin Street
11. Little Man
12. It's Over
13. If I Have To Go
14. Goodnight Irene
15. The Fall Of Troy
16. Take Care Of All My Children
17. Down There By The Train
18. Danny Says
19. Jayne's Blue Wish
20. Young At Heart

BASTARDS
01. What Keeps Mankind Alive
02. Children's Story
03. Heigh Ho
04. Army Ants
05. Books Of Moses
06. Bone Chain
07. Two Sisters
08. First Kiss
09. Dog Door
10. Redrum
11. Nirvana
12. Home I'll Never Be
13. Poor Little Lamb
14. Altar Boy
15. The Pontiac
16. Spidey's Wild Ride
17. King Kong
18. On The Road

TOM WAITS TO RELEASE 3CD SET --ORPHANS: BRAWLERS, BAWLERS AND BASTARDS— NOVEMBER 21 ON ANTI-

WAITS JUST CAME OFF EXCEEDINGLY SUCCESSFUL AND SPECTACULAR 9 DATE TOUR OF THE SOUTH AND MIDWEST CLIMAXING WITH FIRST CLUB DATE IN 3 DECADES AT CLEVELAND’S HOUSE OF BLUES

The one and only TOM WAITS is set to release a 3CD set titled ORPHANS: BRAWLERS, BAWLERS AND BASTARDS. It’s a wide-ranging collection of 54 songs, including 30 new recordings, equaling over three hours of rare and never-before heard music with a 94 page booklet.

“Orphans are rough and tender tunes. Rhumbas about mermaids, shuffles about trainwrecks, tarantellas about insects, madrigrals about drowning,” says Waits. “Scared, mean, orphans songs of rapture and melancholy. Songs that grew up hard. Songs of dubious origin rescued from cruel fate and now left wanting only to be cared for. Show that you are not afraid and take them home. They don’t bite, they just need attention.”

Each of the three CDs is separately grouped and sub-titled – “Brawlers,” “Bawlers” and “Bastards” – to capture the full spectrum of Waits’ ranging and roving musical styles. “Brawlers” is chock full of raucous blues and full-throated juke joint stomp, “Bawlers” contains Celtic and country ballads, waltzes, lullabies, piano and classic lyrical Waits’ songs, while “Bastards” is filled with experimental music and strange tales.

In addition to the new work, Orphans features a number of tracks finding a home on a Waits’ album for the first time - songs originally recorded for the cinema, the theatre and other projects. They include Waits’ unique interpretations of songs by such extraordinarily diverse talents as The Ramones, Daniel Johnston, Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht, Leadbelly, Kerouac and Bukowski.

As for his latest tour, which took him from Atlanta, Asheville, NC, Memphis, Nashville, Louisville, Chicago, Detroit, Akron to Cleveland, where Waits played his first club show in nearly 30 years at the House Of Blues, all shows sold out within minutes. Some of these cities
Waits had not performed in for over 30 years and it was his first foray into Asheville. Needless to say, the audiences were nothing short of ecstatic at each and every gig and the reviews reflected the fans passion.

Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune observed: “Everything about Tom Waits is done with theatrical flair, no expensive props required…In the broadest sense, he is a singer-songwriter, but he is also a genre unto himself…Waits is a defiled saloon singer who turns songs into noirish cinema, little movies about the human condition. When he aims his magnifying glass at the shadows, he inevitably comes up with some amazing discoveries. The human race, it turns out, has a lot of dirty little secrets, unspoken passions, unrequited desires. Waits’ songs give voice to them all, and he finds poetry in even the tawdriest details.”

Fred Mills of Harp magazine described Waits as “a voodoo shaman,” also proclaiming, “There wasn’t a single aspect of the show that could be considered inconsequential.” The review ended by declaring, “Yessir, we did—witness an astonishingly pure expression of artistry…And there he is in the center of the frame, Tom Waits. Jumping right off the screen and straight into our f**king laps. That’s rock ‘n’ roll baby—the IMAX version.”

Peter Gilstrap of The Tennessean noted: “Even back in the ancient pre-country days when the holy structure was an actual church, it’s hard to imagine a more passionate sermonizer gracing the boards than Waits…Where more conventional musicians might use plain old numbers to count off a song, Waits has no problem with setting a tempo via huffs and snorts, sounding like a shaman with emphysema in full chant…A few songs in, the band left the stage, as a piano was wheeled out. With nothing more than 88 keys and a baby blue spotlight, Waits sat down, removed some of the gravel from his voice and turned the auditorium into an intimate nightclub. ‘Tom Traubert Blues’—with its echoes of ‘Waltzing Matilda’-was simply a moving thing of beauty…”

Meanwhile, marking his first release since 2004’s Real Gone, Orphans was again produced by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan (his wife and long time collaborator), who were recently named #4 in a recent Paste magazine collector’s edition naming the “100 Best Living Songwriters.” According to the magazine, “In literature, only a handful of writers have pulled off the near impossible. In music, it happens on every Tom Waits recording.”

Throughout his entire and lengthy critically acclaimed musical career--which has garnered him two Grammys, plus several other nominations, including an Academy Award—Waits and his fevered imagination have managed to keep evolving with each new disc on his more than 20 recordings. The only genre Tom could possibly be placed in would, literally, have to be his very own category—Waitsian.
"What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear." - Tom Waits
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Comments

  • nepalnepal Posts: 143
    Wow, thanks for the info, I can hardly wait new Waits!!!
    ...the dreams ain't broken down here now,
    they're walking with a limp
  • merkinballmerkinball Posts: 2,262
    Wow, this sounds great. I've heard a few of these, looking forward to the rest. One of them, Heigh Ho is the 7 Dwarves song from Snow White, from the excellent 'Stay Awake' CD.
    "You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

    http://www.last.fm/user/merkinball/
    spotify:user:merkinball
  • StoneG82StoneG82 Posts: 806
    I've heard a couple as well.

    "You Can Never Hold Back Spring" is beautiful.
    "What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear." - Tom Waits
  • kdpjamkdpjam Posts: 2,303
    StoneG82 wrote:
    I've heard a couple as well.

    "You Can Never Hold Back Spring" is beautiful.

    pm me ;)
    lay down all thoughts; surrender to the void
    ~it is shining it is shining~
  • StoneG82StoneG82 Posts: 806
    how badass is Tom Waits? seriously. he titles his box set ORPHANS: BRAWLERS, BAWLERS AND BASTARDS.

    check this out:

    http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=DC5E86023E402B65
    "What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear." - Tom Waits
  • Here's a track you can listen to from the new boxset....

    http://media.anti.com/tom_waits/orphans/bottomoftheworld.mp3

    it's excellent.

    tom is a genius
    "What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear." - Tom Waits
  • It's gonna be rad. :)
  • Tom Waits talks about orphans:


    When I was small I always thought that songwriters sat alone at upright pianos in cramped smoky little rooms with a bottle and an ashtray and everything came in the window blew through them and came out of the piano as a song…and in a weird way that is exactly what happens.

    What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.

    At the center of this record is my voice. I try my best to chug, stomp, weep, whisper, moan, wheeze, scat, blurt, rage, whine, and seduce. With my voice, I can sound like a girl, the boogieman, a Theremin, a cherry bomb, a clown, a doctor, a murderer…I can be tribal. Ironic. Or disturbed. My voice is really my instrument.

    Kathleen and I wanted the record to be like emptying our pockets on the table after an evening of gambling, burglary, and cow tipping. We enjoy strange couplings, that’s how we got together. 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.

    If a record really works at all, it should be made like a homemade doll with tinsel for hair and seashells for ears stuffed with candy and money. Or like a good woman’s purse with a Swiss army knife and a snake bite kit.

    Orphans contains songs for all occasions. Some of the songs were written in turmoil and recorded at night in a moving car, others were written in hotel rooms and recorded in Hollywood during big conflamas. That’s when conflict weds drama. At any rate these are the ones that survived the flood and were rescued from the branches of trees after the water’s retreat.

    Gathering all this material together was like rounding up chickens at the beach. It’s not like you go into vault and check out what you need. Most of it was lost or buried under the house. Some of the tapes I had to pay ransom for to a plumber in Russia. You fall into the vat. 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.

    Then we met Karl Derfler, a wizard engineer who works at Bay Side Studios in Richmond, CA, in the science fiction part of town. A battlefield medic, he did a Lazarus on a number of the songs and recorded all the new material.

    On Orphans there is a mambo about a convict who breaks out of jail with a fishbone, a gospel train song about Charlie Whitman and John Wilkes Boothe, a delta blues about a disturbing neighbor, a spoken word piece about a woman who was struck by lightening, an 18th century Scottish madrigal about murderous sibling rivalry, an American backwoods a cappella about a hanging. Even a song by Jack Kerouac and a spiritual with my own personal petition to the Lord with prayer…There’s even a show tune about an old altar boy and a rockabilly song about a young man who’s begging to be lied to.

    I think you will find more singing and dancing here than usual. But I hope fans of more growling, more warbling, more barking, more screeching won’t be disappointed either.

    Tom Waits
    August 2006

    This is ultimately the most anticipated release of the year. (for me at least)

    this could be the best box set ever

    here's what his label had to say:


    Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards is a spectacular musical journey, which visits most every genre of American song tradition.

    The diverse 56-song, 3-disc collection captures the full scope of Tom Waits’ shamanic powers as a vocalist, literary lyricist, romantic melodist, innovative arranger and pioneer of sonic worlds.

    This deluxe limited edition release, written and produced by Waits and his longtime collaborator and wife, Kathleen Brennan contains 30 new and never before heard recordings, plus rare songs taken from collaborations with artists in film, literature and music—complete with a 94-page handmade booklet of lyrics and rare photos. The set, which took over three years to compile and record, is grouped by genre with songs guaranteed to move and shake the heart, the body, the mind and most unquestionably the soul.

    Each of the CD’s are separately arranged and sub-titled – “Brawlers,” “Bawlers” and “Bastards” to encapsulate the full range of Waits’ nomadic scope of musical styles.

    Brawlers is packed with full throated juke joint stomp, boogies and riotous blues. It’s roadhouse Waits,..He chugs, whistles and screams. It’s primal steaming surreal blues. He channels the Stones, Beefheart, Muddy Waters and T-Rex. One new one, “Low Down” is raw garage rock with Waits’ 20 year old son, Casey on drums and San Francisco’s white trash blues icon, Ron Hacker, on guitar.

    Bawlers – Lonesome ballads about the sadness at the end of the road are framed by tender songs of innocence and green hope. The plaintive hill country laments of, “Tell It To Me” and the cautionary tale, “Fannin Street” blend poignantly with saloon songs of betrayal and despair (“The World Keeps Turning”) Celtic waltzes and bitter cabaret torch songs like, “It’s Over” and “Little Drop Of Poison”, all of which explore what the heart gives and what it takes away.

    Bastards – explores the strange and unusual side of Waits, who is peculiar by nature. Contained here is experimental music and scary tales. There are uncategorizable diversions into this dark side. It tunnels beneath the city with spiels, rants, mouth rhythms, including a poignant reminiscence of car ownership, a Ramones cover and a version of Daniel Johnston’s, “King Kong,” a disturbing bedtime story,(not for children faint of heart),and a poem by Charles Bukowski. It has insects, murder, drowning and insanity. Or as ma says, the full dinner menu.

    :)
    "What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear." - Tom Waits
  • merkinballmerkinball Posts: 2,262
    A few more downloads from Tom, specifically another track (You Can Never Hold Back Spring), and a image of the album cover, which looks exceptionally cool.

    http://www.anti.com/media.php?id=1
    "You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

    http://www.last.fm/user/merkinball/
    spotify:user:merkinball
  • alobaralobar Posts: 310
    man, Waits is so friggin' rad. He really is his own genre.
    "I wanna believe in the mercy of the world again."

    WAR + MAGIC BEANS = PEACE
  • direwolf74direwolf74 Posts: 1,622
    Waits is a goddamn genius. I can't wait to hear this thing!
    "I try my best to chug, stomp, weep, whisper, moan, wheeze, scat, blurt, rage, whine, and seduce. With my voice I can sound like a girl, the boogieman, a Theremin, a cherry bomb, a clown, a doctor, a murderer. I can be tribal. Ironic. Or disturbed. My voice is really my instrument."

    -Tom Waits
  • Awesome, i'll be buying this.
  • StoneG82StoneG82 Posts: 806
    so this leaked today. I'm holding off until I have the REAL thing in my hands....

    I've already heard a few people say it's some of the best stuff hes ever done.

    "Lost at the Bottom of the World" blows me away. It's so sad and haunting.
    "What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear." - Tom Waits
  • merkinballmerkinball Posts: 2,262
    Here's another (legit) track, Road To Peace. Even more overtly political than Day After Tomorrow. High register for Tom to sing in too.

    http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/news/39134/Exclusive_MP3_Tom_Waits_Road_to_Peace#39134
    "You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

    http://www.last.fm/user/merkinball/
    spotify:user:merkinball
  • StoneG82 wrote:
    so this leaked today. I'm holding off until I have the REAL thing in my hands....

    I've already heard a few people say it's some of the best stuff hes ever done.

    "Lost at the Bottom of the World" blows me away. It's so sad and haunting.


    i dont know if i can hold off.

    Im obsessed with waits. alice is fucking amazing. table top joe is one of his best.
  • AnonAnon Posts: 11,175
    i am very new to Waits but the more i hear the more i am becoming enthralled.
  • I got the leak version last night and it's freaking incredible. I preordered the real one though, so it's OK.
  • i dont know if i can hold off.

    Im obsessed with waits. alice is fucking amazing. table top joe is one of his best.
    Poor Edward, I love that song from Alice. Such insane lyrics.
  • i'm done the 1st 2 cd's. goddamn, this is good.
    Cheat the odds that made you
    Brave to try to gamble at times
  • merkinballmerkinball Posts: 2,262
    "You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

    http://www.last.fm/user/merkinball/
    spotify:user:merkinball
  • StoneG82StoneG82 Posts: 806
    merkinball wrote:

    yeah...really great interview.

    anyone heard Orphans yet?

    how is it? I've been hearing good things......
    "What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear." - Tom Waits
  • StoneG82StoneG82 Posts: 806
    Both Uncut and Mojo have given Orphans 5 stars.

    uncut:

    http://www.anti.com/news.php?id=225

    mojo:

    http://www.anti.com/news.php?id=224
    "What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear." - Tom Waits
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