#16: Tom Waits: Bad As Me

Details: Tom Waits (b. 1949): Bad As Me. ANTI-, 2011. Total time: 44:36.

I'd love to know what would've happened had Tom Waits been dropped into,  say, the 1920s to see what kind of music he would've produced back then and how or if it would've been different. 

Waits is truly a unique musician with one of the oddest collection of vocal stylings in recorded history I would think.  His trademark low, raspy, growly, groaning singing has likely made more than a few listeners over the years a bit unsettled.

Like a good strong aged and somewhat rare whiskey,  though,  one warms to it after a few sips--or in this case, songs.

Waits has been on the scene for more than four decades now and is one hell of a songwriter as evidenced by this recent album which is another offering of saloon songs, rocking and raging blues, and other stuff that defies categorization. He plays a mean guitar on all of the songs and does piano and other instruments on various songs too.

His singular voice endures and sounds like some strange blend of bits of Louis Armstrong, Wolfman Jack, Christopher Lloyd as Rev. Jim Ignatowski on the old TV show Taxi, and maybe Willie Nelson and even a little Billie Holiday. Actually it's challenging to begin to describe his voice in any way other than indirectly.  You just have to listen to it yourself.

The album opens with not one but two knock-yer-socks-off songs,  the rollicking Chicago and a barnburning Raised Right Men, in which Waits declares emphatically and so truthfully,  "Heavens to Murgatroid...there ain't enough raised-right men."  A couple years ago he performed Chicago and Raised Right Men on the Letterman and Jimmy  Kimmel shows, I believe, in two rare and spectacular late night TV performances.

He could be offering a critique of social media such as Twitter when he sings in falsetto in the eerie third song,  "everybody's talking at the same time." It sounds like a song that could serve as the soundtrack for a scene in a David Lynch movie,  or an episode of the great old TV show,  "Twin Peaks." Waits' piano playing on this song sounds like it was done on an old upright and has the same quality as the piano on Elvis' "Heartbreak Hotel."

Track 4, Get Lost, sounds a lot like The Big Bopper mixed with Buddy Holly. Track 5. Face to the Highway, is wistful and mournful.  Track 6, Pay Me -- an old fashioned waltz -- sounds like Waits recorded it sitting alone in a corner tavern at the bar reflecting,  "I gave up my life for the stage" and "all roads lead to the end of the world." 

And with that the first six songs form a truly classic first "side" of an album.  The remaining seven songs are good too but 1 to 6 are jaw-dropping good stuff.