Tom Waits Nighthawke at The Diner

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' fifth album for Asylum foreshadowed changes that would alter his career over the next six years. It signals a musical restlessness that fueled his next two records (Blue Valentine and Heartattack and Vine), and resulted in his writing a film score and leaving the label for Island, where he was given greater artistic control. He leans less on comic relief here and more on fully formed story songs. The album contains more ballads than most of his records do, but they were the most effective vehicles for the kind of storytelling he was trying to get to. The song "Perfect Strangers" inspired director Francis Ford Coppola to shape the characters for his film One from the Heart (he also convinced Waits to score it, leading to Waits' iconic collaboration with Crystal Gayle)…

Tom Waits' fifth album for Asylum foreshadowed changes that would alter his career over the next six years. It signals a musical restlessness that fueled his next two records (Blue Valentine and Heartattack and Vine), and resulted in his writing a film score and leaving the label for Island, where he was given greater artistic control. He leans less on comic relief here and more on fully formed story songs. The album contains more ballads than most of his records do, but they were the most effective vehicles for the kind of storytelling he was trying to get to. The song "Perfect Strangers" inspired director Francis Ford Coppola to shape the characters for his film One from the Heart (he also convinced Waits to score it, leading to Waits' iconic collaboration with Crystal Gayle)…

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. Alice forgoes the usual nightmare lyric sequences, warped, circus-like melodies, and sonic darknesses that have been part and parcel of Waits' work since Swordfishtrombones…