Tom Waits Orphans

Tom Waits - Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards [Recorded 1984-2005, 3CD Box Set] (2006)

Tom Waits - Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards [Recorded 1984-2005, 3CD Box Set] (2006)
EAC Rip | FLAC (image+.cue+log) - 1,02 GB | MP3 CBR 320 kbps (LAME 3.93) - 446 MB | Covers - 79 MB
Genre: Alternative Rock, Folk, Blues Rock, Singer-Songwriter | RAR 3% Rec. | Label: Anti (6677-2)

Orphans is the most unwieldy Tom Waits collection yet. Packaged in a Cibachrome-tinted box are three discs containing 56 songs total. It claims 30 new tunes, but a mere 14 can be found on other records - six others have to be hunted for while the remainder have shown up in various incarnations. This crazy thing began as a collection of outtakes, rarities, soundtrack tunes, and compilation-only cuts - some of which survive here in new form, including tracks from the Ramblin' Jack Elliot tribute, the Bridge benefit, and two Ramones covers, to name a few. In other words, the first conception was as a hodgepodge collection of attic material. Waits checked out the tune selection as it was and said something like "nah, bad idea; this would suck"…
Tom Waits - Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (Remastered) (2017)

Tom Waits - Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (Remastered) (2017)
FLAC (tracks), Lossless / MP3 320 kbps | 3:09:45 | 436 Mb / 1 Gb
Genre: Blues Rock, Alternative, Singer-Songwriter / Label: Anti - Epitaph

At this stage of the game, any new Tom Waits record is an event. Listening through the music of his entire career is daunting, to say the least, but it's a journey no one else, with the possible exception of Bob Dylan, has taken before. If one listens to the official recordings, from 1973's Closing Time, featuring the songs of an itinerant Beat barroom singer (no lounges please), right on through to the frenetic mania of 2004's Real Gone, one becomes aware of not only the twists and turns of a songwriter wrestling and bellowing at and with his muse, but of a journeyman artist barely able to hold on to the lid of his creativity, let alone keep it on.

Tom Waits - Small Change (1976) [Non-remastered]  Music

Posted by gribovar at Jan. 17, 2023
Tom Waits - Small Change (1976) [Non-remastered]

Tom Waits - Small Change (1976) [Non-remastered]
EAC Rip | FLAC (image+.cue+log) - 253 MB | MP3 CBR 320 kbps (LAME 3.93) - 117 MB | Covers - 6 MB
Genre: Folk, Blues, Jazz, Singer-Songwriter | RAR 3% Rec. | Label: Asylum (1078-2)

The fourth release in Tom Waits' series of skid row travelogues, Small Change proves to be the archetypal album of his '70s work. A jazz trio comprising tenor sax player Lew Tabackin, bassist Jim Hughart, and drummer Shelly Manne, plus an occasional string section, back Waits and his piano on songs steeped in whiskey and atmosphere in which he alternately sings in his broken-beaned drunk's voice (now deeper and overtly influenced by Louis Armstrong) and recites jazzy poetry. It's as if Waits were determined to combine the Humphrey Bogart and Dooley Wilson characters from Casablanca with a dash of On the Road's Dean Moriarty to illuminate a dark world of bars and all-night diners. Of course, he'd been in that world before, but in songs like "The Piano Has Been Drinking" and "Bad Liver and a Broken Heart," Waits gives it its clearest expression…

Tom Waits - Foreign Affairs (1977) [Non-remastered]  Music

Posted by gribovar at Jan. 19, 2023
Tom Waits - Foreign Affairs (1977) [Non-remastered]

Tom Waits - Foreign Affairs (1977) [Non-remastered]
EAC Rip | FLAC (image+.cue+log) - 195 MB | MP3 CBR 320 kbps (LAME 3.93) - 99 MB | Covers - 9 MB
Genre: Blues, Jazz, Singer-Songwriter | RAR 3% Rec. | Label: Elektra (1117-2)

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 - The Heart Of Saturday Night (1974) [Non-remastered]  Music

Posted by gribovar at Jan. 16, 2023
Tom Waits - The Heart Of Saturday Night (1974) [Non-remastered]

Tom Waits - The Heart Of Saturday Night (1974) [Non-remastered]
EAC Rip | FLAC (image+.cue+log) - 214 MB | MP3 CBR 320 kbps (LAME 3.93) - 98 MB | Covers - 3 MB
Genre: Folk, Blues, Jazz, Singer-Songwriter | RAR 3% Rec. | Label: Asylum (1015-2)

If Closing Time, Tom Waits' debut album, consisted of love songs set in a late-night world of bars and neon signs, its follow-up, The Heart of Saturday Night, largely dispenses with the romance in favor of poetic depictions of the same setting. On "Diamonds on My Windshield" and "The Ghosts of Saturday Night," Waits doesn't even sing, instead reciting his verse rhythmically against bass and drums like a Beat hipster. Musically, the album contains the same mixture of folk, blues, and jazz as its predecessor, with producer Bones Howe occasionally bringing in an orchestra to underscore the loping melodies. Waits' songs are sometimes sketchier in addition to being more impersonal, but "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night" and "Semi Suite" are the equal of anything on Closing Time…
Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle - One From The Heart [OST] (1982) [Non-remastered]

Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle - One From The Heart [OST] (1982) [Non-remastered]
EAC Rip | FLAC (image+.cue+log) - 204 MB | MP3 CBR 320 kbps (LAME 3.93) - 99 MB | Covers - 4 MB
Genre: Jazz, Soundtrack | RAR 3% Rec. | Label: CBS/Columbia (CK 37703)

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…

Tom Waits - Heartattack And Vine (1980) [Non-remastered]  Music

Posted by gribovar at Jan. 27, 2023
Tom Waits - Heartattack And Vine (1980) [Non-remastered]

Tom Waits - Heartattack And Vine (1980) [Non-remastered]
EAC Rip | FLAC (image+.cue+log) - 205 MB | MP3 CBR 320 kbps (LAME 3.93) - 104 MB | Covers - 5 MB
Genre: Blues, Rock, Singer-Songwriter | RAR 3% Rec. | Label: Elektra (295-2)

Heartattack and Vine is Tom Waits' seventh and final album for Asylum. As such, it's transitional. As demonstrated by its immediate predecessors, 1978's excellent Blue Valentine and 1977's Foreign Affairs, he was already messing with off-kilter rhythms even in the most conventionally structured blues and jazz songs, with nastier-sounding guitars - he plays a particularly gnarly style of rhythm on this entire album. Five of these nine tracks are rooted in gutbucket blues with rock edges and primal R&B beats. By this time, his singing voice had deteriorated to a gasping-for-breath whiskey-and-cigarettes growl that could make words indecipherable from one another, but his jazzman-inspired phrasing more than compensated…

Tom Waits - Asylum Years (1986)  Music

Posted by gribovar at Dec. 28, 2022
Tom Waits - Asylum Years (1986)

Tom Waits - Asylum Years (1986)
EAC Rip | FLAC (image+.cue+log) - 356 MB | MP3 CBR 320 kbps (LAME 3.93) - 166 MB | Covers - 5 MB
Genre: Folk, Blues, Singer-Songwriter | RAR 3% Rec. | Label: Asylum/WEA (7559-60494-2)

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 - Franks Wild Years (1987)  Music

Posted by gribovar at Dec. 25, 2022
Tom Waits - Franks Wild Years (1987)

Tom Waits - Franks Wild Years (1987)
EAC Rip | FLAC (image+.cue+log) - 287 MB | MP3 CBR 320 kbps (LAME 3.93) - 133 MB | Covers - 5 MB
Genre: Experimental Rock, Dark Cabaret, Singer-Songwriter | RAR 3% Rec. | Label: Island Records (422-842 357-2)

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…

Tom Waits - The Early Years Vol. 1 [Recorded 1971] (1991)  Music

Posted by gribovar at Jan. 4, 2023
Tom Waits - The Early Years Vol. 1 [Recorded 1971] (1991)

Tom Waits - The Early Years Vol. 1 [Recorded 1971] (1991)
EAC Rip | FLAC (image+.cue+log) - 187 MB | MP3 CBR 320 kbps (LAME 3.93) - 102 MB | Covers - 2 MB
Genre: Rock, Folk, Blues, Singer-Songwriter | RAR 3% Rec. | Label: Manifesto (MFO 40601)

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.