Happy birthday Tom Waits

On December 7, 1949, Thomas Alan Waits was born to Jesse Frank Waits and Alma Johnson McMurray.

Tom Waits joins voice cast of ‘Wildwood’

Animation studio Laika has revealed the voice cast for its next stop-motion and CG animated feature, Wildwood. According to Hollywood Reporter, Tom Waits will be heard along side Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day and Richard E. Grant in this movie directed by Travis Knight and based on the novel by The Decemberists lead singer and songwriter, Colin Meloy.

KCRW to release 1987 Tom Waits recording

Radio station KCRW will be releasing various live recordings - ‘recently unearthed and unheard for nearly 40 years’ and ‘newly-remastered’ - from its  archives. One of those is Tom Waits' interview and performance of August 24, 1987 (which has been circulating as a bootleg). Other names include Nick Cave, Cowboy Junkies, Daniel Lanois and R.E.M.

The Bent By Nature archive will be released to the general public on November 14 on KCRW, members get early access starting Friday November 4.

In tandem, KCRW will launch BENT24, a 24-hour, on-demand streaming service featuring a shuffling playlist of Deirdre O’Donoghue’s SNAP episodes (1981-1991). 

From the press release: 

When approached by KCRW for permission to release his live performance, Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan wrote, “In a town filled with sounds borne of the marriage of music and commerce, Deirdre [O’Donoghue] was a voice and venue for the undiscovered or marginalized and a refuge for artists who felt estranged from the prevailing currents. She opened so many ears and hearts, including ours, with her earthy and irreverent voice and wide ranging enthusiasm for all music. So great someone thought to do this.”

From the archives: 'We're all mad here'

 While celebrating the 20th anniversary of Blood money and Alice, you might want to have a look at what Tom Waits had to say about those albums in 2002. 

Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles

Found this book on Amazon: Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles by British film and television director, writer and producer Alex Harvey. It is described as ‘A gritty, smoke-filled, and boozy account of musician Tom Waits’s formative decade in Los Angeles’. 

‘Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits’s career, when he lived, wrote, and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles: from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time in 1973, to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones in 1983. Starting his songwriting career in the seventies, Waits absorbed Los Angeles’s wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city’s literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. Mixing the domestic with the mythic, Waits turned quotidian, autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic, a vision of Los Angeles as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.’

Listen to an interview with Alex Harvey for radio Monocle's ‘Meet the writers’; 

More live recordings available

As mentioned in my previous post, we were treated to live recordings of God's Away on Business and Table Top Joe, but that's not all. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of the albums Alice and Blood Money the following live recordings have also been made available: 

The Part You Throw Away (Prague, Czech Republic, July 22, 2008)
Misery Is The River Of The World (Amsterdam, Netherlands, November 21, 2004)
All The World Is Green (unknown) 
God's Away on Business (Edinburgh in 2008)
Another Man's Vine (Milan, Italy on July 18, 2008)

Table Top Joe (Berlin, Germany,  November 16, 2004)
Fish And Bird (unknown)
Lost In The Harbour (Prague, Czech Republic,  July 22, 2008)
Reeperbahn (Amsterdam, Netherlands, November 19, 2004)
Alice (Berlin, Germany, November 15, 2004)

As you can see, dates and venues of the All The World Is Green and Fish And Bird recordings are unknown, so if you know when or where these were made, don't hesitate to contact me. I think God's Away on Business is from July 28, 2008, as that song wasn't played on the first Edinburgh show. 

To wrap it all up, there's also a live version of Burma Shave (Theatre De L'Empir in Paris, France, May 6, 1979) to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the album Foreign Affairs.

More links to all your favorite streaming platforms here or you can find it on Amazon: Blood Money and Alice.

New live recordings

To promote the re-issues of Blood Money and Alice, TomWaits.com has put live recordings of God's Away on Business (recorded in Edinburgh in 2008) and Table Top Joe (Berlin, 2004) online.