Shaun de Waal CD of the week
Between 1973 and 1980, Tom Waits made seven albums for Asylum Records. From those works were selected and collected the songs that appeared on his previous “best of”, conveniently tagged The Asylum Years.
You could hear, over those albums, the transformation of someone who was always an unusual singer-songwriter into one of the most original musical artists of our time.
It was, however, with the switch to Island Records in 1983, and his extraordinary album Swordfishtrombones, that Waits hit the motherlode that has fuelled his unique talent since then. The voice got even gruffer and the music even weirder, as Waits married his post-Dylan lyrics – surreal snapshots of the United States’s marginal people -to music that had more than a little in common with the twisted blues of Captain Beefheart or the lovely clangour of hobo-composer Harry Partch’s homemade instruments.
As Waits developed his singular vision with the brilliant Rain Dogs (1985) and on, up to his recent collaboration with Robert Wilson and William Burroughs, The Black Rider, banjos, marimbas and cellos made a place for themselves in the rock song; on one number, Waits even plays a chair.
His new anthology, Beautiful Maladies, is subtitled The Island Years, and it collects almost all the high points of the last decade and a half (though not, unfortunately, in chronological order). There is everything from the strange saga of Frank, who “hung his wild years on a nail that he drove through his wife’s forehead”, through the delightful denial of IDon’t Wanna Grow Up, to the heartbreaking beauty of Downtown Train. He has few peers.