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TOM WAITS – "BAD AS ME"

TomWaits

"Jimmy Stewart said he stopped making movies because he didn't like the way he looked on screen anymore. I'm more the guy who says I look like hell but I'm going to see where it gets me."Tom Waits


Bad As Me is Tom Waits' 17th studio recording. In order to do this folk legend justice, I'll turn over the story behind the album to an excerpt from Tim Adams at The Guardian. Special thanks to Get Fresh Crew member Katrina Lehr-McKinney for this week's recommendation.

"The album is the latest in his heroic one-man attempt to include the whole history of American song in his own voice – now bellowing like a deranged Louis Armstrong, now essaying a Marvin Gaye falsetto, now groaning like Lead Belly, always very much himself. Waits likes to divide his repertoire into "grand weepers and grim reapers" or "bawlers and brawlers"; Bad As Me is no exception to this. It starts with the most convincing runaway train you've ever heard, Waits shovelling coal insanely, and then shifts gears between desperate, defeated ballads and the kind of "rumpus" you imagine from the party scene of Where the Wild Things Are. ("Anyone who has ever played a piano," Waits likes to say, "would really like to hear how it sounds when dropped from a 12th-floor window." His music satisfies that curiosity.)"

Bad As Me is out today via ANTI-. Read Adams' entire interview with Waits over here. Listen to "Back in the Crowd" from Bad As Me, below.

– The Music Director