Tom Waits, an American Singer/Songwriter/Actor,
released his latest album BAD AS ME,
out October 2011, which is nominated for a GRAMMY for “Best Alternative Music Album” 2013. His first Grammy was back in 1992.
Waits sometimes dubbed “America’s Craziest Uncle” was inducted
into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame in
2011. Click the link below for the presentation by Neil Young.
Rolling Stone critic, Daniel Durchholz describes Waits voice
“Like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse
for few months and then taken outside and
run over with a car”, that pretty much describes it to a tee.
NPR ‘s Jesse Dylan writes “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 20th 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”.
Tom Waits: Discography - Many well know artists have recorded his music, you may be surprised by his list of recordings.
Warm Beer & Cold
Women
Bad As Me
