Round 17 - vote for your LEAST favorites

  • Underground

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Singapore

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Clap Hands

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Cemetery Polka

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Jockey Full of Bourbon

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Time

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Hang on St. Christopher

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Temptation

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Innocent When You Dream

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • I'll Be Gone

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Yesterday Is Here

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Franks Theme

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • More Than Rain

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Way Down in the Hole

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Telephone Call from Istanbul

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Cold Cold Ground

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    2
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View attachment 6625
ELIMINATED in Round 5:
Midnight Lullaby
Diamonds on My Windshield
Emotional Weather Report
Eggs and Sausage

PROMOTED:
Ol' 55
I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love With You
Martha
Better Off Without a Wife
Warm Beer and Cold Women
Nobody

Small Change (1976)

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If Nighthawks at the Diner was Tom at his peak moment of Beatnik, Small Change is the night that follows. You couldn't get a boozier record unless you actually soaked your vinyl in whiskey. Touring, writing, recording, and the musician lifestyle started to get the better of Tom in the mid-70s and it shows in spades through his songwriting.

Small Change returns to Tom's more melodic side while also debuting the true sound of the "Waits voice" that we will come to know throughout the rest of his career. The instrumentation is both sparse and lush, some songs containing just Tom and his piano, others with sweeping string sections. The subject matter turns to the seedy aspects of inebriated nightlife once again, as Tom weaves tales of strippers and drunks over jazzy chords and slurry melodies.

Jim Hughart returns on upright bass, Bones Howe once again produces, and Jerry Yester (producer of Closing Time) arranges and conducts the strings. Many fans, and possibly even Tom, see this album as the crowning moment of his "beatnik-glory-meets-Hollywood-noir period".




Down in the Hole podcast, Episode 4 - Small Change

Tom Waits Song by Song podcast, playlist for Small Change


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Still amuses me thats Ms Elvira on the cover.
 
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ELIMINATED after Round 8:
I Can't Wait to Get Off Work
Cinny's Waltz
Muriel
Medley: Jack & Neal/California
Potter's Field
Barber Shop
Foreign Affair

PROMOTED
I Never Talk to Strangers
A Sight for Sore Eyes
Burma-Shave

After making quick work of Foreign Affairs, we move on to...

Blue Valentine (1978)

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Taking everything we've already heard and adding a heavier, bluesier approach yields Tom's next album. Blue Valentine continues to evolve the new "Waits" voice with a bit more edge, a bit less tipsy-beatnik jazz.

This album contains a patchwork of musicians who play on different songs based on what each song demands. Expanding his network of players allows Tom to paint more broadly, pulling different genre masters into the fold (a trend which will continue on future releases). Jim Hughart still shows up for some tracks, along with two other bassists, a few different drummers and guitar players. Orchestration also plays a large role on Blue Valentine, especially on the slightly odd choice of an opener.

The woman on the back cover is Rickie Lee Jones, another songwriter and performer with whom Waits had a relationship at the time. She would go on to initially have a better career than Tom based on the success of her first single, "Chuck E.'s in Love" - written about Chuck E. Weiss, an L.A. friend mentioned in several Waits songs.

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Art Fein, Chuck E. Weiss, Tom

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Down in the Hole podcast, Episode 6 - Blue Valentine

Tom Waits Song by Song podcast, Blue Valentine playlist
 
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Blue Valentine and the more blues/less jazz approach really works for me. Probably my #3 (after Heart of Saturday and Heartattack & Vine) of the Asylum era.

Somewhere, Kentucky Ave, and A Sweet Little Bullet from Blue Valentine are a step below for me.

Shiver Me Timbers and Looking For the Heart... both have more schmaltz than San Diego so they get voted down.

Tom Traubert and Step Right Up are the standouts on Small Change, out with the others.
 
Blue Valentine and the more blues/less jazz approach really works for me. Probably my #3 (after Heart of Saturday and Heartattack & Vine) of the Asylum era.

Yeah, after the first two albums this is where I really start to dig into Tom. The jazzy stuff is fun for a minute, but his shift towards blues (and further) is far more interesting and entertaining to me.

Gonna get to this over The Weeknd

I highly recommend always listening to Tom Waits over listening to The Weeknd.
 
I liked the album. Definitely bluesier and feels like he is expanding his sonic palette a bit. I'm starting to hear hints of Rain Dogs.
 
Damn, this album has really come alive and hit me hard over the past couple weeks. The more I dig into it, the more I like it in both concept and execution. Blue Valentine is certainly Tom's most realized and mature work yet.

Every single song on Blue Valentine is a song of loss. Every character has lost something or loses something within the song, often a life. The whole ties together brilliantly with parallel themes and repeated lyrical motifs such as the colors red and blue, Christmas, and the 4th of July.

Somewhere - A ridiculously strange choice of an opener at first glance, but the whole thing serves as almost an overture (or a pre-emptive epilogue). It feels like a sincere plea of hope for the characters on this album - no matter how lost they are or how lost they become, somewhere there's a place for them. Also, being a West Side Story song, it introduces the gang elements and Romeo/Juliet personas that we're going to hear about on the rest of the album. All that said, this isn't a Tom Waits song I love listening to and certainly not one I'll go back to as a favorite.

Red Shoes by the Drugstore - This one's got a cool beat and adds some new instrumental elements to Tom's palette, as Mosh said, but it's not a favorite of mine. We hear the story of a woman waiting by the newsstand for a man who never shows up because he either died or got arrested trying to hold up a jewelry store. It's a solid song and we see that Tom is going to be telling stories a lot here instead of making his "character" part of the story. Apparently he got very tired of his drunk character before making this album, hence why we get more third-person tales and some true emotion from him. This song is solid, but expendable.

Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis - One of the single greatest storytelling tracks in Tom's entire songbook. It's all assembled on a repetitive piano phrase with a mostly spoken melody, but it just works so damn well. The little details throughout do a great job of engrossing the listener in the tale. Here we have a woman lost in a lie writing a letter to a man she lost, trying to bluff him into believing something has changed even though they both know it never will. The line "well how do you like that" gets me chuckling a little bit every time. A classic.

Romeo Is Bleeding - We're entering gang territory now, calling back to the opener, as Tom spins the tale of a Mexican gang leader who is so cool that he even dies like a champ. It's a groovy little tune with a cool swagger and some nice lines, but the ending is a bit too long.

$29.00 - Speaking of too long, this slow blues jam is eight minutes long! I know this is a controversial song among some Waits fans, but something about that repetitive tag line hooks me every time. But I'm a sucker for any song that uses the same tag line throughout while changing the story and meaning around every verse that precedes it. Here we have a tale of a young girl who moves to LA with wide eyes and quickly gets suckered in by a local gang member/pimp/criminal of some sort. I dig it.

Wrong Side of the Road - This song really jumped up in my ratings over repeated listens. It's Tom's first foray into mystical, voodoo-style weirdness. The whole thing reads to me like a demon of some sort conjuring a spell to make a woman get lost with him. It could be just a bad guy convincing a woman to run away with him, even though he knows he's bad news, but I prefer the darker, weirder story. It opens up at the end at just the right time. Again, I really dig it.

Whistlin' Past the Graveyard - Damn this song grooves so hard. Like the previous song, Tom inhabits a demonic vibe here as a man (or creature) who actively seeks out bad luck. I love the New Orleans vibe of the horns and the plinky guitar line. We're in our second instance of Tom feeling devilish on the album, something that will definitely return in later releases.

Kentucky Avenue - Coming out of two very oddball, slightly evil pieces to possibly one of the most sincere ballads of Tom's early years. By all accounts, this song is actually a description of Tom's childhood street and some of his friends (including a buddy who grew up with polio). It feels wistful and childlike, especially in the lyrics. This seems like an outlier from the concept of the record, but I think it fits really well. After two tracks of Tom taking death and darkness as far as it can go, he pulls back the curtain and shows something he has lost: childhood innocence. The intense emotion in his voice starting from the line "I'll take the spokes from your wheelchair and a magpie's wings..." just wrecks me every time. Tom will definitely make this kind of song later with a better melodic sense, but this track still does wonders for me.

A Sweet Little Bullet From a Pretty Blue Gun - Other than Somewhere, this is easily the weakest track on the album. There's nothing wrong with it on the surface, but it's thematic territory we've already covered on the album. A young girl moves to LA with big dreams and dies (possible from suicide - which reintroduces the Juliet theme). Mostly I dislike the placement here. I think the "story" of the album has already peaked and this just feels tacked on.

Blue Valentines - Another masterpiece. The chord and melodic structure of this song would be amazing even without the spine-chilling lyrics. There's some personal interpretation left up to the listener here, but the more I read the lyrics the more I'm convinced that this song is about a man who kills his lover on Valentine's day and can never escape the memory of her or his violent actions. The "blue" is her body, cold and blue, and also his emotions. This Romeo is lost because of his own actions and, regardless of what the opener states, he will never escape it and there will never be a place for him. The sparse instrumentation just adds to the desolate, beautiful feeling.

Also voting for San Diego Serenade, Piano Has Been Drinking, and Small Change.

Calling @Deus_Adrian & @JudasMyGuide (& @Shadow?)!
 
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Damn, this album has really come alive and hit me hard over the past couple weeks. The more I dig into it, the more I like it in both concept and execution.

Yup. I had the same reaction. Usually all of the pre-Swordfish albums blur together for me, but playing game really made me appreciate Blue Valentine way more than I did in the past.
 
Yeah, same here. I understand it’s a tough ask - definitely not metal, challenging material, lots and lots of albums - but it was always a risky survivor proposition anyway.

Hopefully we’ll get some people to jump back onboard during the peak albums.
 
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Eliminated after Round 9:
The Piano Has Been Drinking
Small Change
Somewhere
Red Shoes by the Drugstore
Kentucky Avenue
A Sweet Little Bullet from a Pretty Blue Gun

Promoted:
Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)
Step Right Up
Invitation to the Blues

Heartattack and Vine (1980)

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Continuing in the same fashion as the previous album, Tom continues to embrace blues on Heartattack and Vine. This is his last album with Asylum records and, in a way, the end of an era. The "Tom Waits voice" is now in full swing, as most of the songs on this album feature his bellowing growl. Most notable of the songs here is "Jersey Girl" which went on to be famously covered by Bruce Springsteen.

The tunes here are both sentimental and gritty, with string flourishes here and there by Bob Alcivar. Bassist Jim Hughart still appears on a few tracks but this is also the first showing of Larry Taylor - who will play on every Waits album from now on and perform as his touring bassist. Bones Howe remains at the knobs as producer.

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Down in the Hole podcast, Episode 7 - Heartattack and Vine

Tom Waits Song by Song podcast, Heartattack and Vine playlist
 
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The structure feels disjointed here. The second half is infinitely stronger than the first. Apparently he recorded this album while scoring Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart (a truly terrible film with a truly terrible soundtrack by Waits that basically consists of 12 versions of "I Never Talk to Strangers"). Tom was dissatisfied with his work on the film and during one of the many breaks in production he wrote and recorded this album. It's scattered, sure, but it also points Waits in the direction he needed to go. It takes awhile to get going, but once it does I really like this album.

Heartattack & Vine
- A monster of a tune that immediately sets the mood for this album: groovy, howling, and dark. I love this song. Sure, it could stand to lose a minute, but it's so damn groovy I simply don't care. This is a top tier Waits song for me. His voice is in absolutely full force. 10/10

In Shade - A truly bizarre piece. Not only is it the least of Tom's instrumentals, it is also in the worst place on the album. I could see this opening the album, closing it, whatever - anything except the second track after another blues song. The fake crowd is just silly. Some nice synced-up rhythm parts, but ultimately the tune goes nowhere. 5/10, vote

Saving All My Love For You - At first glance this is an innocuous song in the style of some early ballads, but the more you dig in the worse it gets. At best it feels half-assed and and worst like a pastiche of Tom's earlier career. The meaning is muddled, the lyrics are both overwrought and under-thought, and the strings just don't work this time around. Tom's wife and key collaborator Kathleen Brennan has told Tom this song is shit and the style something he needed to avoid. The first line is actually quite brilliant, however, "It's too early for the circus, it's too late for the bars", i.e. he can't quite bring himself to unleash the mad circus clown that will appear next and yet he can't keep writing songs about being drunk in a bar. 4/10, vote

Downtown - This one rips pretty hard thanks to the incredible Hammond organ from Ronnie Barron. It's a typical Waits tune, but I dig it. Downtown oozes the blues in a good way. Only voting because I prefer the second half of this album. 8/10 vote

Jersey Girl - Possibly the first song Tom wrote about Kathleen and the sentimentality is immediately apparent. This is the first (and possibly last) "Sha la la" we'll ever get from Tom. It jams along nice and slowly, with a really warm plucked guitar and bass. I feel like this is where Tom really grows up. It's kind of impossible not to love this song. Tom's singing is full of heart. I would say that "joy" is not one of Tom's main songwriting ingredients, but Jersey Girl is full of joy and it's nice to hear. 10/10

Til the Money Runs Out - Goddamn the groove on this is so cool and unique. It really could appear on the next few albums and feel totally at home. The way Tom starts the vocals right before the beat in the beginning is masterful. The band is on fire and Tom's playing with the words and his different vocal textures. I can't make heads or tails of any deeper meaning, but I still love it. 9/10

On the Nickel - I think a lot of people probably dislike this song. The strings are maudlin, so is the message, but I find it captivating. This was written for another film and seems to condemn the way of life that is portrayed in many of Tom's earlier songs, saying that many of these characters will end up "on the nickel" = on the streets forever/dead. I don't know why I love this so much, but I do. When he jumps an octave into his more gravelly range it's sublime. 10/10

Mr. Siegal - I'm a sucker for barroom strut and lyrics alluding to heaven and hell. I adore this song. Again, it could lose a minute of run time, but who cares? It's the most fun to be had on this album. 10/10

Ruby's Arms - It's a beautiful song, in a way, but also a bit troublesome. It's an ode to a woman you're leaving in the middle of the night without notice. Kind of tough to sympathize with (especially considering the horns, strings, and vibes throughout). It's a bit much, but still a pretty tune. 8/10 vote

Also voting for San Diego Serenade, Romeo, $29
 
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ELIMINATED after Round 10:
Saving All My Love For You
'Til the Money Runs Out
Mr. Siegal

Let's knock out a few more songs before transitioning into the peak Waits era!
 
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