Tom Waits' "Orphans (Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards)"

[the captain]

Anyone get this 3-disc set of rarities, re-recordings and new material yet? I got it Tuesday, and think it's fantastic. I'm curious how other Waits fans feel about it. (Non-Waits fans, let me do your work for you: "He can't sing, he croaks, he's weird, etc." There. Your part is done.)

[CosmicDancer]

I bought it and I think it is a fantastic set!  That man never ceases to blow me away.  I don't think he has ever released anything that was bad.  If you are a fan, go buy this right now.  If you aren't a fan, you are wrong!   

[Daniel S.]

I don't own any Tom Waits albums but ever since I read 'Waiting For The Sun' by Barney Hoskyns I've been eyeing Mr. Waits' albums. Didn't he do an album called Short Change that's very good? Which album of his do you think is good to start with/

[the captain]

My personal Waits favorites are those from 1983 onward. It's pretty hard to go wrong with any of them from that era and after:

swordfishtrombones
Rain Dogs
Frank's Wild Years
Bone Machine
Black Rider
Mule Variations
Alice
Blood Money

I admit, I don't like 2004's Real Gone as much as those. And I really do like Blue Valentine, which is from the later '70s. Otherwise, I'm not as big a fan of his 70s stuff, although I do like it and own it, too. It's more the lounge-jazz influenced, whereas from the 80s onward he took in, well, other influences.

[CosmicDancer]

I don't own any Tom Waits albums but ever since I read 'Waiting For The Sun' by Barney Hoskyns I've been eyeing Mr. Waits' albums. Didn't he do an album called Short Change that's very good? Which album of his do you think is good to start with/

The album is called Small Change and it is one of my favorites.  It has my favorite Tom Waits song Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen).  That song is absolutely magnificent and I conisder a highlight of my life to be seeing him perform it live. 

As I said before, I don't think the man has made a bad album.  Luther is right though, his strongest material is the swordfishtrombones to present era.  Mule Variations might just be my favorite, but if you ask me in a week, my opinion might change a bit.  They are all great!

[the captain]

One additional note: you might want to check allmusic or something before buying any albums. Because otherwise you might get yourself into somthing you didn't expect, like the sound of some Germanic Captain Beefheart bellowing through a megaphone while smacking around the trash in a junkyard. The three '80s Island albums are very, um, clangy (not to say there aren't great melodies in there, too). And then the two early 90s albums get into a weird primal thing, with a lot of distant mic'ing, atmospheric noise, etc. Mule Variations kind of mixes his different styles well. Alice and Blood Money contain music written for plays, and they are very theatrical, and both generally pre-rock in their musical vocabulary. Real Gone is much more modern in terms of its instrumentation. And now Orphans is all over the map.

[mikee]

In the 1980's I attended a show he did at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.  He opened that show, for some reason, with a great version of the relatively obscure Door's song "Take It As It Comes".   It was certainly unexpected and was an impressive statement.   I thought that Waits brought that song to life wonderfully.  Normally, at   least at that point in time, I thought of him as a jazz guy.