Tom Waits – Alice (canadian Bootleg) (1999)

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…

STUNNING BROADCAST RECORDING FROM THE GLITTER AND DOOM TOUR. Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, the three CD set of Tom Waits’ rarities and previously unreleased archive tracks, was issued in November 2006, and was the great man’s first new album since 2004’s Real Gone. The record was released to highly positive reviews, scoring 92 out of 100 on aggregator Metacritic, indicating "universal acclaim". It ranked second on Metacritic's Top 30 albums of 2006, and was nominated for the 2006 Shortlist Music Prize and the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Prior the release of Orphans…, Waits performed a short series of shows in the summer of 2006, across the South and Mid-West of the US, which he titled ‘Orphans’. Featuring numbers from the pending box set, Tom’s son Casey played with him in the band accompanying Tom. • In 2008, Waits embarked on his ‘Glitter and Doom Tour’, starting in the U.S. and then moving to Europe. Both of his sons played with him on the tour. At the June concert in El Paso, Texas, he was awarded the keys to the city. Among the finest concerts Tom and entourage played on this tour however, was their show at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta Georgia, on 5th July. Performing a quite extraordinary set covering cuts from numerous past records, plus a smattering of new material to boot, the event was dazzling. Previously unreleased, this new 2CD Set now contains the entire live broadcast, which was transmitted in the greater Georgia area at the time.

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.

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…