Tom Waits : Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards

I’ve noticed that a number of music magazines have recently compiled their top albums of the year. This is understandable given the time of the year. Normally the only new releases we get around this time are the tedious ‘best of’ collections devised to exploit the Christmas market and the loathsome ‘one album a year’ brigade who have given Robbie Williams a career.

But there has been one beacon of light in the past week. In fact, it’s more of a primal growl from the wilderness as we reach the twilight hours of 2006. That’s right – Tom Waits has returned with his new record Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. It’s a three-hour collection of rare and never-before-heard material, thirty tracks of which are new recordings.

Orphans finds Waits display all his colours from folk balladeer to offbeat storyteller to nightcap crooner to the Ringmaster of the darkest circus you’ve ever attended. I think some of those magazines were a bit premature with their compilations. I’ve been living with these albums for a week and they certainly deserve to feature in many a top ten list. Perhaps it’s being saved for December 2007.

Here’s a great track from the Brawlers cd called ‘Lie To Me’.



Waits remains one very entertaining guest also. Here are just two of his recent television appearances on US TV; one with an obviously star-struck Jon Stewart and the other with Dave Letterman where he talks of a new definition of the term 'Dead Ringer', and a very unsettling definition it is too. You'll laugh and shudder at the same time.





And I couldn't really not put this one up. From the Jim Jarmusch 2003 movie Coffee and Cigarettes - Tom and Iggy disuss coffee, cigarettes, drummers, what to call each other, doctors and the jukebox. A tense 10 minutes!!