The subtitle of this old-and-new collection — Brawlers, Bawlers And Bastards — could also have been Rockabillies, Crooners And Poseurs or Sadists, Masochists And Sado-Masochists or Rhythms, Images And Failed Experiments. Its three discs are full of shape-shifting sounds thematically organized not to make a statement, but for a better reason: to be listenable. And they are, as musically consistent and comprehensive a portrait of Tom Waits as one could possibly imagine.
If another artist has taken deeper, more personal possession of the whole range of American vernacular music, it’s hard to say who. Dylan perhaps, or Elvis, comparisons that only seem hyperbolic because of the nagging and oft-noted feeling that for Waits, the cosmos of American music is a cosmic joke, a put-on, whether moaned in full lovebroke crooner mode or tossed off in electric freakouts. Even the handsome, sturdy 90-page book of photos and free associations deceives by omission: no session data is included, so it’s anyone’s guess when, where, how and who recorded the tracks (musicians are listed en masse for each disc). Waits wants the set to stand outside of time, to evoke some mystery of aesthetic wholeness. And yet it’s a compilation all the same; if nothing else, his collaborators deserved proper credit.
But the greatness of this set — and nearly each of these 56 tunes is remarkable; only the two hidden tracks at the end of disc three seem superfluous — isn’t in its continuity or air of completeness. It lies in the individuality of each song or narration, most of which are as rhythmically and melodically strong, as realized, as any single he’s ever released. The sequencing is shrewd, even when shuttling between covers of Daniel Johnston (a scary, funny, howling version of “King Kong” that first appeared on a 2004 Johnston tribute), Kurt Weill, Lead Belly, the Ramones and Charles Bukowski. Over three decades of recording, Waits has attempted everything, and so Orphans tries it all again — and succeeds because the songs are sturdy enough to stand alone.
“I got no use for the truth!” Waits wails on “Lie To Me”, the first of many hard-shell rockabilly blues on the Brawlers disc. And just when the set threatens to settle into the dirty clang and howl he can do so effortlessly, he shifts to a surreal and beautiful country waltz, “Bottom Of The World”, then into a chain-gang shout called “Lucinda”, then a recent political song, “The Road To Peace”.
He’s never written anything like “The Road To Peace”, a topical digest of the horrific news of eye-for-an-eye attrition between Jews and Palestinians. “If God is great and God is good, why can’t he change the hearts of men?” Waits asks, without a trace of irony. “Maybe God himself is lost upon the road to peace.” Best of all, though, is the archetypal blues “Rains On Me”, which makes good on his Delta debts without forcing the issue.
Bawlers begins with a musical-theater set piece “Bend Down The Branches”, buoyed by light strings and horns, melting into the fragile glimpse of hope “You Can Never Hold Back Spring”. And then more waltzes, which of all his rhythmic obsessions are the ones most suited to his temperament. Waits’ touch is far lighter than his eccentricities indicate, his romanticism as sincere as the folk sources he so often plunders.
“Leave me alone you big old moon,” he sings on “Shiny Things”; he’s more at home with the crows who prefer the shiniest detritus to build their nests. On “The World Keeps Turning”, he keeps waltzing even though the band has stopped playing, and on “Fannin Street” he sings — delicately, wisely — of losing the innocence of an open future: “Now I know where the sidewalk ends.” On “If I Have To Go”, he evokes a traveling musician or a soldier or a dreamer saying farewell to dreams. The piano lines make no pretense to be more than simple, halting and true. On Bawlers, he lets melody and image resonate on their own terms; it’s the most purely beautiful single disc he’s ever released.
The third disc, Bastards, begins with a black Brechtian joke: The punchline of “What Keeps Mankind Alive” is “bestial acts!” Like much of Bastards, it’s a false fable, a children’s story for the perverse child in everyone. And so “Children’s Story” follows with a nihilistic bedtime tale, and “Army Ants” continues with a mini-encyclopedia of the darkest corners of entomology, read to the tune of staccato acoustic guitar and bass. It’s more hilarious than creepy.
More work songs clang and pump like primitive but always efficient engines. The folk song “Two Sisters” further clarifies Waits’ relation to tradition; he has adapted its essential shape and melody before, thus it’s more than welcome to hear him tackle the origin. “First Kiss”, a love song to wife Kathleen Brennan (or at least her name is chanted as the tune winds down) reels off images savored for their sounds — “Elkhart, Indiana,” “scrapular wings,” “root beer fizz” — as tapes spin backward around him. “Redrum” is a minor drone collage, and “Dog Door” is a failed exercise in distorting, through brick wall limiting, the sound of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band. And then comes yet another song of lost youth, “Home I’ll Never Be”, which sounds like a live stage recording, over solo piano. The prodigal son never makes it home. The line “God loves me just as I love him” isn’t a blessing; it’s a curse.
With Orphans’ non-chronological sequence, a decades-younger Waits sings back and forth to the elder; the earlier voice seems to be but another identity, as opposed to another artist altogether. The common chart of Waits’ career fixes a turning point with the self-produced Swordfishtrombones in 1983. The chart’s not wrong, exactly, but Orphans argues for a single but complex self beneath all masks and inventions.
“At the center of this record is my voice,” Waits says in his Artist Statement. And at the center of that voice is a commitment to the self, and to the skill it takes to shape that self into a lifetime of beautiful, strange and utterly individual songs.
