Tour rumours

Rumours about a Tom Waits tour are floating around again. No dates are confirmed yet, but the rumours seem pretty reliable.

Coffee and cigarettes DVD

According to Amazon.com, the Coffee and Cigarettes DVD will will be released on September 21, 2004.

Day After Tomorrow on Future Soundtrack for America

As reported earlier, Tom Waits is contributing the song Day After Tomorrow to Future Soundtrack for America, an album sponsored by MoveOn.org, an organisation providing financial support to ,,congressional candidates who embrace moderate to progressive principles of national government''. You can order the album at MoveOn.org or, if you're less politically inclined at other on line music stores such as Amazon.com.

Bukowski documentary

Waits features in the new Charles Bukowski documentary Born Into This by director John Dullaghan.

Long Gone soundtrack

Waits is to provide the soundtrack for Long Gone, a documentary about six "train-hoppers": modern-day hobos who travel the country without luggage, home or final destination. Airing on the Canadian Documentary Channel is scheduled for fall 2004.

Altman movie?

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Tom Waits might star in another Robert Altman movie, based on the popular radio show The Prairie Home Companion. Radio show host Garrison Keillor himself is to write sthe screenplay for the movie, which is set to begin shooting in January at the Fitzgerald Theater. If the financing falls into place this picture will reunite Lily Tomlin, Lyle Lovett and Tom Waits again after their appearance together in Altman's Short Cuts. Waits and Lyle would play Dusty and Lefty, the singing cowboys.

-ANTI releases more info on Real Gone

And it is way too much to put up over here, so get over to the -ANTI site and read about the new album.

Los Lobos do it again

On August 3, Los Lobos will drop the six-track covers EP Ride This, which features the group's takes on Tom Waits' Jockey Full of Bourbon.

Real Gone tracklist

Due to a lack of news and a busy schedule, it has been a rather slow blog week, but I'm still here.

-ANTI has released some more info on the new album, Real Gone. Looks like the Europeans will get the album two days in advance: the release date is October 3, the U.S. have to wait until October 5.

The tracklist:

Top of the Hill
Hoist That Rag
Sins of My Father
Shake It
Don't Go Into That Barn
How's It Gonna End
Metropolitan Glide
Dead and Lovely
Circus
Trampled Rose
Green Grass
Baby Gonna Leave Me
Clang Boom Steam
Make It Rain
Day After Tomorrow
(Catalog Number:86678)

Real Gone: ,,an electric pill box''

In NME, Tom Waits says Real Gone is ,,an electric pill box... a homogeneous concoction of mood elevators, mind liberators and downers, an alchemical universe of rattling chains, oscillating rhythms and nine-pound hammers."

Real Gone completed

According to a press wire release on Yahoo, Real Gone is officially completed. According to the release, Tom Waits will not be playing the piano on the albumn which will feature 15 tracks.

REAL GONE: Tom Waits Has Completed Groundbreaking New CD for Anti Records
- Titled 'REAL GONE' - Out October 5

LOS ANGELES, June 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Academy Award nominated and Grammy Award winner, Tom Waits has been long considered one of music's most influential artists because he has continuously created music outside of fad or fashion. With REAL GONE, his off-road adventures are taken into the further beyond. Mixing and mashing: worlds both sonic and ethnic, musical traditions both new and old, and rhythms both mouth-made and sampled from his own instruments, Waits has reached a new pinnacle.

Written and produced by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, his wife and long- time collaborator, REAL GONE features 15 tracks of funk, Jamaican rock-steady, blues both urban and rural, rhythms and melodies both Latin and African and, for the first time, no piano.

The crash and collide of rhythms and genres within a song creates a hybrid unlike any music he has made before. The comic, funky, hip-hop/r&b inspired instructional dance number, "Metropolitan Glide" ("now show your teeth, bray like a calf/Then kill me with your machine gun laugh") and the sonic mayhem and nonsense rhyme ride to "Top of the Hill" (why don't you give me another cup of that soup?/Turn a Rolls Royce into a chicken coop") are both punctuated by a live band and turntable playing along to Waits' home recorded voice percussion.

Lyrically and musically the kinetic songs play against the haunting lull of the ballads. The epic, ominous and hypnotic Jamaican rock-steady groove of, "Sins of the Father," follows the dark trails of straying, passed on from generation to generation, from those at the top to those at the bottom and back around again, echoing a theme of the record.

While Waits has traditionally used his voice as an actor, inhabiting each song with a different vocal character, on numerous songs here, he also uses it as chugging, sputtering, wheezing syncopated engine of sound and rhythm that can explode like a string of sidewalk firecrackers or sound like the indecipherable incantations of a street corner shaman.

REAL GONE is a place, a time beyond reach: a lost mind, a renegade leader, war love sublime, love lost, death, desire, escape. These are the themes of the record inspired by the giddy lust, high voltage, out of orbit times -- a vertigo of splash and trash popular culture spinning alongside the gun to our head and the knife in our heart political times or as "Shake It" says, "I feel like a preacher waving a gun around."

REAL GONE is also a musical expression, the experience of playing and losing yourself to the place where you can finally be found.

In a musical career that has spanned four decades and over 20 albums "Waits has," according the Los Angeles Times Robert Hilburn, "come through it all with a body of work that stamps him clearly as one of the most important figures of the modern pop era." REAL GONE adds more weight to that claim.