Caliendo Tom

Tom Waits brings an appropriately international flavor to his mostly instrumental score for Jim Jarmusch's globetrotting taxicab movie. As in all his music of the time, Waits' chief influence is Kurt Weill, and using horns and accordion among other instruments, he re-creates Weill's creepy, catchy style in 16 short tracks running almost 53 minutes. He and Kathleen Brennan contribute three songs with lyrics, which Waits performs in a calmer, more melodic way than those on some of his recent albums. Still, this soundtrack is very much in the style of Waits' Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Franks Wild Years albums.

Tom Waits collaborated with director Robert Wilson and librettist William Burroughs on the musical stage work The Black Rider in 1990. A variation on the Faust legend, the 19th century German story allowed Waits to indulge his affection for the music of Kurt Weill and address one of his favorite topics of recent years, the devil. Waits had proven an excellent collaborator when he worked with director Francis Ford Coppola on One from the Heart, making that score an integral part of the film. Here, the collaboration and the established story line served to focus Waits' often fragmented attention, lending coherence and consistency. He then had three years to adapt the score into a record album in which he did most of the singing and writing…

Tom Waits wrote a song called "Frank's Wild Years" for his 1983 Swordfishtrombones album, then used the title (minus its apostrophe) for a musical play he wrote with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, and toured with in 1986. The Franks Wild Years album, drawn from the show, is subtitled, "un operachi romantico in two acts," though the songs themselves do not carry the plot. Rather, this is just the third installment in Waits' eccentric series of Island Records albums in which he seems most inspired by German art song and carnival music, presenting songs in spare, stripped-down arrangements consisting of instruments like marimba, baritone horn, and pump organ and singing in a strained voice that has been artificially compressed and distorted…

It's been long time since Tom Waits recorded an album as saturated with tenderness as this one. The carny-barker noise merchant who has immersed himself in brokenness and reportage from life's seamy, even hideous underbelly for decades has created, along with songwriting and life partner Kathleen Brennan, a love song cycle so moving and poetic that it's almost unbearable to take in one sitting. Alice is alleged to be the "great lost Waits masterpiece." Waits and Brennan collaborated with Robert Wilson on a stage production loosely based on Alice Liddell, the young girl who was the obsession and muse of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books. The show ran in Europe for a time and the production's 15 songs were left unrecorded until now…

One From the Heart is the score to the most misunderstood of Francis Ford Coppola's films. Far ahead of its time in terms of technology, use of color, montage, and set design, its soundtrack is the only thing that grounds it to earth. Coppola's movie is a metaphorical retelling of the exploits of Zeus and Hera set in Las Vegas. Coppola claims to have been taken with the male-female narrative implications of the track "I Don't Talk to Strangers," off Tom Waits' Foreign Affairs album. That cut was a duet with Bette Midler. Midler wasn't available for One From the Heart, however, so Waits chose Crystal Gayle as his vocal foil. The result is one of the most beautifully wrought soundtrack collaborations in history. Along with producer Bones Howe, Waits and Gayle cut their duets largely from the studio floor, live with the small combo-style studio band that included the saxophonist Teddy Edwards, drummer Shelly Manne…

Tom Waits has said: "I like a beautiful song that tells you terrible things. We all like bad news out of a pretty mouth." When it comes to the material on Blood Money, I don't know if I can call Waits' mouth pretty, but he certainly offers plenty of bad news in a very attractive, compelling way. Released simultaneously with Alice, a recording of songs written in 1990, Blood Money is a set of 13 songs written by Waits and Kathleen Brennan in collaboration with dramatist Robert Wilson. The project was a loose adaptation of the play Woyzeck, originally written by German poet Georg Buchner in 1837. The play was inspired by the true story of a German soldier who was driven mad by bizarre army medical experiments and infidelity, which led him to murder his lover - cheery stuff, to be sure…

Tom Waits grew steadily less prolific after redefining himself as a junkyard noise poet with Swordfishtrombones, but the five-year wait between The Black Rider and 1999's Mule Variations was the longest yet. Given the fact that Waits decided to abandon major labels for the California indie Epitaph, Mule Variations would seem like a golden opportunity to redefine himself and begin a new phase of his career. However, it plays like a revue of highlights from every album he's made since Swordfishtrombones. Of course, that's hardly a criticism; the album uses the ragged cacophony of Bone Machine as a starting point, and proceeds to bring in the songwriterly aspects of Rain Dogs, along with its affection for backstreet and backwoods blues, plus a hint of the beatnik qualities of Swordfish…

Southside Johnny Lyon has been fronting one of America's most consistently hard-rocking R&B show bands, Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes, for well over 30 years, so this album should come as something of a surprise to longtime fans - here Southside sings a dozen tunes from the songbook of Tom Waits alongside a jazzy, full-bodied big band led by Richie "LaBamba" Rosenberg, a longtime fixture in the Asbury Jukes horn section (and a member of Max Weinberg's band on Late Night with Conan O'Brien). While this is very much a change of pace, it's one that both Lyon and Rosenberg handle with confidence and aplomb; Lyon's voice shows a touch more grain than it did in his salad days with the Jukes, but his sense of phrasing and showman's touch is superb, and he brings swagger, heart, and sincerity to every performance here, and when Waits shows up for a duet on "Walk Away," the two trade lines as if they've been singing together for years…

Consider The Best of Everything a companion piece to An American Treasure, the first posthumous Tom Petty compilation. Weighing in at four CDs, An American Treasure was designed as a gift to the devoted who were still in mourning. In contrast, The Best of Everything is aimed at the fan who didn't dig quite so deep, or perhaps to listeners who always liked Petty but never bothered to purchase an album. The Best of Everything relies on the hits that were largely absent on the box set but it takes a similar non-chronological approach to sequencing, a move that emphasizes Petty's consistency as both a songwriter and recording artist. This distinguishes The Best of Everything from 2000's Anthology: Through the Years, which also spanned two discs and contained four fewer songs than this 2019 set. Apart from that notable aesthetic choice, there is a considerable amount of overlap between the two double-disc collections – namely, all the hits Petty had with and without the Heartbreakers between 1976 and 1993, when he switched from his longtime home of MCA to Warner.