Rec | A LOT OF TOM WAITS

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Rec'd on 💿 1/24: WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN LISTENING TO?

A lot of tom waits

As we’re in that period of winter where everything seems permanently grey I find myself reaching for his work often

@strawberrylamb

Jan 24, 2025

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baths - obsidian

this is an album I return to in the fall/winter, and while it might not sound like a comfort album from the description i’m about to give it still plays a sort of comfort album role for me during this time of year where it’s easy to isolate and feel listless. this album was made in the midst of a period of debilitating illness for the artist that left him mostly bedridden for months at a time, during which he had little else to do but languish in his deteriorating mental and physical state. each song focuses on a different thought spiral that took over his mind in this time: his past relationship failures, his unhealthy coping mechanisms, his “inner demons,” and his increasingly frail body. though the subject matter is pretty bleak, the production and composition across the album is gorgeous, and the care that went into making the album reveals how music became an escape for Baths–a medium into which his suffering could be channeled into something which allowed him to transcend the restrictions of his illness and give meaning to his pain. I found this album during a time of similar struggles in my own life, and the album was a sort of companion to me throughout that period. It gave me some sense of not being alone in my experience, and if Baths could make it through his period of isolation and pain, then there was no reason to think that my own wouldn't also pass eventually. luckily it did, and now I can listen back to this album and find comfort in the role it played for me and also just enjoy it for being gorgeous music regardless of any personal connection I have to it. also I think it’s a hopeful album simply because it exists–a testament to Bath’s resilience as an individual and talent as an artist. and since he’s found health and happiness and gone back to making the very cute and wholesome music that is his usual style anyway all this to say if you tend to feel a little bleh this time of year and have a high tolerance for hearing other’s tragedies then this album is a great fall listen and oddly kinda cozy

@royallmonarch

Nov 1, 2024

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Get behind the mule - spiritual by Tom waits

Previously unreleased version of a song from his 1999 album Mule Variations. I have no clue what instrument he used for this. It sounds like a distorted guitar but it plays like a piano and you can hear the pedal squeaks? It's very atmospheric and a perfect autumn song for the approaching season. "Definitely part of the original idea was to do something somewhere between surreal and rural,” Waits said in a statement. “We call it surrural. That’s what these songs are: surrural. There’s an element of something old about them, and yet it’s kind of disorienting….” (Tom Waits via Pitchfork) I crave new Tom Waits every day of my life

@caskeyc

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Listening to tom Waits’ entire discography in order of release date

It’s as if you are listening to man lose his mind, his reality warping and shifting album after album, growing darker, grittier, and kookier. Over an almost forty year span, the evolution of Waits’ voice is fucking insane, it becomes grittier and raspier with every album, it’s as if in the breaks between recording he had been consuming glass and stones. The instrumentation too grows more grotesque and experimental over the course of his career morphing from a jazzy, bluesy sound into something wholly abnormal, perhaps most exemplified by 1985’s ‘Rain Dogs’.