Tom Waitts Bad

Bad as Me is Tom Waits' first collection of new material in seven years. He and Kathleen Brennan - wife, co-songwriter, and production partner - have, at the latter's insistence, come up with a tight-knit collection of short tunes, the longest is just over four minutes. This is a quick, insistent, and woolly aural road trip full of compelling stops and starts. While he's kept his sonic experimentation - especially with percussion tracks - Waits has returned to blues, rockabilly, rhythm & blues, and jazz as source material. Instead of sprawl and squall, we get chug and choogle. For "Chicago" - via Clint Maedgen's saxes, Keith Richards' (who appears sporadically here) and Marc Ribot's guitars, son Casey Waits' drums, dad's banjo, percussion and piano, and Charlie Musselwhite's harmonica (he appears numerous times here, too) - we get a 21st century take on vintage R&B…

Bad as Me is Tom Waits' first collection of new material in seven years. He and Kathleen Brennan - wife, co-songwriter, and production partner - have, at the latter's insistence, come up with a tight-knit collection of short tunes, the longest is just over four minutes. This is a quick, insistent, and woolly aural road trip full of compelling stops and starts. While he's kept his sonic experimentation - especially with percussion tracks - Waits has returned to blues, rockabilly, rhythm & blues, and jazz as source material. Instead of sprawl and squall, we get chug and choogle. For "Chicago" - via Clint Maedgen's saxes, Keith Richards' (who appears sporadically here) and Marc Ribot's guitars, son Casey Waits' drums, dad's banjo, percussion and piano, and Charlie Musselwhite's harmonica (he appears numerous times here, too) - we get a 21st century take on vintage R&B…

The Early Years, Vol. 1 is an album of early demos recorded by a 21-year-old Tom Waits in 1971, two years before the release of his first album, Closing Time, and issued on the record label owned by his ex-manager. Waits accompanies himself on piano or guitar and sings in an unaffected nasal tenor. (One track, "Ice Cream Man," is given a full-band treatment.) Several of these songs, notably "Ice Cream Man," "Virginia Ave.," "Midnight Lullabye," and "Little Trip to Heaven," turned up on his later albums, but the overall level of writing and performance is well below Waits' usual standard.

Like its predecessor, The Early Years, Vol. 2 consists of demos recorded by Tom Waits in 1971, two years before he released his debut album, Closing Time. "Hope I Don't Fall in Love With You," "Ol' 55," "Grapefruit Moon," and "Old Shoes" later turned up on that album, while "Shiver Me Timbers," "Diamonds on My Windshield," and "Please Call Me Baby" appeared on Waits' second album, The Heart of Saturday Night, in 1974. The release of the two Early Years albums demonstrates that Waits' better early material made it onto his regular releases - the previously unreleased stuff, while interesting, is not as good. Still, Waits fans will enjoy hearing, for example, "Ol' 55" performed in a higher key and with an acoustic guitar backing.

The second British Tom Waits compilation was a more extensive look at the 1973-1980 Asylum Records catalog than the first, Bounced Checks from 1981 (four more tracks), but it was another idiosyncratic selection. Waits' stellar first two albums were better represented, with three strong tracks drawn from The Heart of Saturday Night and two from Closing Time, but "Ol' 55" was ignored again, and nothing was included from the third album, Nighthawks at the Diner, which is the favorite of many Waits fans. Three tracks were repeated from Bounced Checks - "Burma Shave," "I Never Talk to Strangers," a duet with Bette Midler, and "Tom Traubert's Blues" - and they were worthy, but where was "Jersey Girl"? The choices from the later albums were spotty: why use Waits' questionable cover of "Somewhere" from West Side Story and leave out a brilliant story-song like "Romeo Is Bleeding"…

Tom Waits' debut album is a minor-key masterpiece filled with songs of late-night loneliness. Within his chosen narrow range of the cocktail bar pianistics and muttered vocals, Waits and producer Jerry Yester manage to deliver a surprisingly broad collection of styles, from the jazzy "Virginia Avenue" to the uptempo off-kilter funkiness of "Ice Cream Man." The acoustic guitar folkiness of the tender "I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You" is an upside-down take on the Laurel Canyon sound, while the saloon song "Midnight Lullaby" would have been a perfect addition to the repertoires of Frank Sinatra and/or Tony Bennett. Waits' entire musical approach is highly stylized and, in its lesser moments, somewhat derivative of some of his own heroes: "Lonely" borrows from Randy Newman's "I Think It's Going to Rain Today"…

Between the release of Heartattack and Vine in 1980 and Swordfishtrombones in 1983, Tom Waits got rid of his manager, his producer, and his record company. And he drastically altered a musical approach that had become as dependable as it was unexciting. Swordfishtrombones has none of the strings and much less of the piano work that Waits' previous albums had employed; instead, the dominant sounds on the record were low-pitched horns, bass instruments, and percussion, set in spare, close-miked arrangements (most of them by Waits) that sometimes were better described as "soundscapes." Lyrically, Waits' tales of the drunken and the lovelorn have been replaced by surreal accounts of people who burned down their homes and of Australian towns bypassed by the railroad - a world (not just a neighborhood) of misfits now have his attention…