The Turning Gate

Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards

The other best album of 2006

Tom Waits is one of the most prolific and important artists to have made music in the last thirty-some odd years. And if the years were odd, the music has been more so – and that’s as it should be. His latest album, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, is proof positive that, at the ripe age of 57, Waits hasn’t lost his magic, or his madness.

Released on ANTI Records, Orphans is comprised of 56 songs spread over three discs, a combination of 30 new and never before heard recordings, plus rare songs taken from collaborations with artists in film, literature and music. Orphans has everything. It ranges the full gamut of Waits’ vocal and musical abilities, showing him for the master that he is and visiting nearly every American musical tradition in the process.

But this is Tom’s album, and there’s nothing I can say about it that he hasn’t said better. In Tom’s own words, from ANTI’s page on 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

To that, I have only this to add: Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards is one of the finest albums of 2006. No Tom Waits’ fan should be without it. And if you’re not a Tom Waits fan, then maybe it’s time you became one; Orphans should make for an excellent beginning.

ANTI’s Orphans page contains several MP3s for download, and the music video for “Lie To Me”. Check the “Related Downloads” section in the right-column of their page. There you can also read what ANTI has to say about the album, and check out some of the other stellar reviews the album has received from the musical press.

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