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TOM WAITS

Tom Waits

The Black Rider - 2023 Reissue

    Celebrate 5 of Tom Waits’ albums from the Island years, all of which have had an incredible impact on music history.

    All remastered to HD audio.

    TRACK LISTING

    Side A
    Lucky Day Overture
    The Black Rider
    November
    Just The Right Bullets
    Black Box Theme
    'Tain't No Sin
    Flash Pan Hunter/Intro
    That's The Way
    The Briar And The Rose
    Russian Dance
    Side B
    Gospel Train/Orchestra
    I'll Shoot The Moon
    Flash Pan Hunter
    Crossroads
    Gospel Train
    Interlude
    Oily Night
    Lucky Day
    The Last Rose Of The Summer
    Carnival

    Tom Waits

    Bone Machine - 2023 Reissue

      Celebrate 5 of Tom Waits’ albums from the Island years, all of which have had an incredible impact on music history.

      All remastered to HD audio.

      TRACK LISTING

      Side A
      The Earth Died Screaming
      Dirt In The Ground
      Such A Scream
      All Stripped Down
      Who Are You
      The Ocean Doesn't Want Me
      Jesus Gonna Be Here
      A Little Rain
      Side B
      In The Colosseum
      Goin' Out West
      Murder In The Red Barn
      Black Wings
      Whistle Down The Wind
      I Don't Wanna Grow Up
      Let Me Get Up On It
      That Feel

      Tom Waits

      Franks Wild Years - 2023 Reissue

        Originally released in 1987 on Island Records, Franks Wild Years is Tom Waits’ 10th studio album. Titled for a play of the same name and authored by Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, Franks Wild Years was performed by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 1986. Franks Wild Years is an iteration of the track “Frank’s Wild Years” from Waits’ 1983 album Swordfishtrombones.The album divides the story neatly into two acts and although titled “un operachi romantic”, there is no opera in Franks. There is a hilarious touch of operatic styling by Waits himself in the song “Temptation.” His vocal character varies wildly throughout the work’s 17 songs, and is no more impressive than when the gruff, growly singer turns to impeccable Sinatra-esque phrasing on the Vegas number, “Straight To The Top.” While Franks featured a 14-member cast on stage, the album is all-Waits—yet suggests a multitude of characters by virtue of his chameleon vocals. The album is a startling group of lost dreams, bad dreams, dreams that might not even be dreams. The music is nightmarish, ethereal, beautiful. Think broken calliopes played by genius children, horns played at dawn in a graveyard, banjos leaking through practice room walls. Titles evoke Frank’s dime-store Odyssey: “Straight To The Top,” “Blow Wind Blow,” “Temptation,” “I’ll Be Gone.” NME ranked the work the number five album of 1987.

        Newly remastered for the first time ever from the original ½” flat master tape and personally overseen by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering under the guidance of Waits’ longtime audio engineer, Karl Derfler. The album packaging has also been restored. Franks Wild Years includes tracks such as “Cold Cold Ground,” “Way Down In The Hole” – versions of which were used as the theme music of HBO’s series The Wire – and “Temptation.”

        TRACK LISTING

        Side A
        Hang On St. Christopher
        Straight To The Top (Rhumba)
        Blow Wind Blow
        Temptation
        Innocent When You Dream (Barroom)
        I'll Be Gone
        Yesterday Is Here
        Please Wake Me Up
        Franks Theme
        Side B
        More Than Rain
        Way Down In The Hole
        Straight To The Top (Vegas)
        I'll Take New York
        Telephone Call From Istanbul
        Cold Cold Ground
        Train Song
        Innocent When You Dream (78)

        Tom Waits

        Rain Dogs - 2023 Reissue

          Noted as Tom Waits’ most critically acclaimed album, Rain Dogs follows the new musical path Waits had taken with Swordfishtrombones. Considered the middle of a de facto trilogy with Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years, Rain Dogs is the first of Waits’ albums to be written in New York, in a Lower Manhattan basement. A 53-minute, 19-track monster, Rain Dogs is a kind of mutant, late 20th century musical “Canterbury Tales” with a shape-shifting band. There are banjos and marimbas and bowed saw and parade drum and howling horns (and Keith Richards and Marc Ribot) on this rollicking, rough-hewn opus—and Waits, using his voice in increasingly weird-and-wild ways. The songs are stories, sagas, laments, breakdowns, character studies, comedies and cabaret numbers. There’s the aching “Hang Down Your Head,” and the moving anthem, “Downtown Train,” which was covered by Patti Smith and Rod Stewart.Waits coined the term, “rain dog,” a reference to dogs who lose their way when touchstone scents are washed away in storms. Among the lost dogs on the album: gruff, wandering merchant marines (“Singapore”), an accordion player in a slaughterhouse (“Cemetery Polka”), a “jockey full of bourbon” (also the song title), an abandoned, withdrawn woman (“Time”), a “gun street girl,” the old drunks and hustlers of Union Square, and even Waits, himself: Aboard a shipwreck train / Give my umbrella to the Rain Dogs / For I am a Rain Dog, too...

          Originally released in 1985 on Island Records, the album is newly remastered for the first time ever from the original ½” flat master tape and personally overseen by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering under the guidance of Waits’ longtime audio engineer, Karl Derfler. The album packaging has also been restored. Rain Dogs includes tracks such as “Downtown Train,” “Clap Hands” and “Jockey Full Of Bourbon.”

          TRACK LISTING

          Side A
          Singapore
          Clap Hands
          Cemetery Polka
          Jockey Full Of Bourbon
          Tango Till They're Sore
          Big Black Mariah
          Diamonds And Gold
          Hang Down Your Head
          Time
          Side B
          Rain Dogs
          Midtown
          9th & Hennepin
          Gun Street Girl
          Union Square
          Blind Love
          Walking Spanish
          Downtown Train
          Bride Of Rain Dog
          Anywhere I Lay My Head

          Tom Waits

          Swordfishtrombones - 2023 Reissue

            2023 Marks forty years since Tom Waits released Swordfishtrombones, ushering in a new and critically acclaimed musical era for Waits and his longtime songwriting and production partner, Brennan. Waits went from ‘70’s-era “bluesy, boozy” wordsmith and melodist with seven albums behind him to sound sculptor, miner of the subconscious, abstract orchestrator, sonic cubist—while retaining his innate lyricism, melodic invention, humanity. As he put it in a 1983 interview: “I tried to listen to the noise in my head and invent some junkyard orchestral deviation—a mutant apparatus to drive this noise into a wreck collection.” It’s a Waits-arranged pastiche, a variety of atmospheres from different sound planets. There is the warped, marching-army-ants music of “Underground,” an impressionist chant about people living below cities, but there was also the poignancy of the spare piano ballad, “Soldier’s Things,” the good bar yarn, “Frank’s Wild Years”, the tender, minimalist paean to Waits’ wife and muse, Kathleen, “Johnsburg, Illinois,” and the raggedy anthem to neighborhood chaos, “In the Neighborhood.”“On Swordfishtrombones, Waits has made a breakthrough – he’s found music as evocative as his words. Waits’s grumble of a voice now bounces off a peculiar assortment of horns and percussion and organ and keyboards, as if he’d led a Salvation Army band into a broken-down Hong Kong disco. It’s as if he’s shifted from monologues to screenplays…” – Jon Parales January 1984 – GQ Magazine.

            The album is newly remastered for the first time ever from the original EQ’ed ½” production master tape and personally overseen by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering under the guidance of Waits’ longtime audio engineer, Karl Derfler.

            TRACK LISTING

            Side A
            Underground
            Shore Leave
            Dave The Butcher
            Johnsburg, Illinois
            16 Shells From A 30.6
            Town With No Cheer
            In The Neighbourhood
            Side B
            Just Another Sucker On The Vine
            Frank's Wild Years
            Swordfishtrombone
            Down, Down, Down
            Soldier's Things
            Gin Soaked Boy
            Trouble's Braids
            Rainbirds

            Tom Waits

            Brawlers

              For the first time, Tom Waits will make available as individual records his 2006 classic 56 song release Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. 

              The collection of 56 songs went far beyond a simple career retrospective. It dipped back as far as 1984 with the bulk of it’s songs hailing from the mid-nineties onward. Over 2/3 of the material had never been heard when originally released in 2006 and had 30 newly recorded songs. Orphans also featured a number of songs finding a home on a Waits’ album for the first time. They included Waits’ unique interpretations of songs by such diverse talents as The Ramones, Daniel Johnston, Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht and Leadbelly. These outtakes, rarities and the previously unreleased material were separately grouped into themes and named, Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards. And now these titles will be released individually. 

              Brawlers is a collection of raucous blues and full-throated juke joint stomps.


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