Tom Waits – Bad As Me (Anti Records)
“Some songs come out of the ground just like a potato,” Tom Waits once explained, in his typical part-serious, part-absurdist fashion. “Others, you have to make out of things you've found like your mother's pool cue, your dad's army buddy, your sister's wrist watch. That type of thing.” While many of Waits' explanations for his songs and his creative process can seem like some glib sleight of hand – an attempt to steer discussions away from the nuts and bolts of his writing procedure and keep the songs' mystery intact – this particular statement is somewhat more revealing. It's territory Waits has been mining for four decades, affording the mundane and the fantastic such equal gravity that such distinctions often seem moot. His is a world in which the craggier back roads of American consciousness intersect with its Main Streets, where Beat poets and film noir antiheroes cavort with short-order cooks and housewives. It's an approach not without its antecedents, but Waits incorporates his influences so thoroughly into the fold that they become very much his own.
That said, Tom Waits does little to surprise anybody anymore, unless that listener has never heard his music at all. Bad As Me, his first album of new material since 2004's Real Gone, is more or less what one expects from Waits, with a few small alterations. Where its predecessor was a harsh, gnarled affair, arguably Waits' most aggressive and discordant, his newest is largely more subdued. This isn't to say that Bad As Me strays too far from Waits' oeuvre – his gravelly voice still overlays the junkyard tangos and fractured balladry upon which he's built a career – but the manic, unfocused rawness of his previous album is dialed back considerably. Bad As Me is structurally leaner as well, with a tracklist scaled back to thirteen songs, the songs themselves favoring a concision from which Waits has often strayed in recent years.
The political content that he began exploring on his previous album rears its head as well, with the anti-war polemic of “Hell Broke Luce” acting as the album's most abrasive moment, a stomp and shout take on war's realpolitik. Lines like “How is it the only ones responsible for making this mess / Got their sorry asses stapled to a goddamn desk?” and “Listen to the general, every goddamn word / How many ways can you polish up a turd?” do not exactly place the song among the more subtle that Waits has written. “Everybody's Talking At The Same Time,” an eerie blues shuffle, tones down the vitriol somewhat, though lines like “We bailed out the millionaires / They got the fruit / We got the rind / And everybody's talking at the same time” lose none of their acerbic edge. It's an interesting contrast to the sort of lyrics for which he's best-known (whether fairly or not), with no one-eyed blackjack dealers, dwarf priests, or philosophically-minded prostitutes anywhere in sight.
It's difficult to tell whether Waits' forays into straightforward commentary, an approach he had shied away from for the first three-and-a-half decades of his career, are a sign of the dire times in which we live, or an attempt to separate Tom Waits the individual and songwriter from Tom Waits the eccentric public persona. It raises the question of where such an iconoclastic artist is supposed to take his craft after spending decades treading the same aesthetic territory with only minor variations, or whether such an artist should even attempt to tamper with the formula at all. Many of the artists from whom Tom Waits has drawn the most inspiration – Howlin' Wolf, Harry Partch, Captain Beefheart – worked largely within a singular aesthetic, with only the occasional attempt at offering any variations that might imperil their respective reputation (think Beefheart's later work).
Slight detours aside, Bad As Me is a good example of what Waits can do right. He's culled some of the collaborators with whom he's come up with his best work – Marc Ribot, David Hidalgo, even Keith Richards – and utilized their abilities with a degree of restraint and subtlety that is often overlooked. For all the larger-than-life personalities, the songs are paramount, and while these often seem divergent, they work towards the same purpose, helping to place the album in the larger spectrum of Waits' work, with as many retrospective moments as forward-thinking ones. For all the blustery moments like “Hell Broke Luce,” there are equal numbers of songs that recall the stronger material on Rain Dogs or Bone Machine. Opener “Chicago” uses enmeshed polyrhythmic horns, propulsive drums, and blues guitar to emulate the forward momentum of the train carrying the narrator and a lover. The former attempts to convince the latter that “everything will be better in Chicago,” invoking the sort of idle hope that imbues novelty with salvific properties, an aspiration that is almost guaranteed to fail because of its loftiness. “Face To The Highway” renders a meditation on rootlessness in an almost funereal light, with tolling bells and lugubrious violin loping along in a mournful dirge. Some songs look back further still - “Kiss Me” could easily have been an out-take from Blue Valentine, with the downtrodden lounge singer vibe in full force, lamenting vocals propped up with a mixture of sparse piano, occasional upright bass flourishes, and subtle guitar work that retains a looseness approximating the blues without playing too strongly into any of its well-worn tropes.
Ironically, many of the songs that don't find a tidy analog in Waits' back catalog look further back than his own career for influence, as if to move forward he had to push further back than he had previously. “Back In The Crowd” imbues a lovelorn ballad with the sort of gentle syncopation that pianist Jelly Roll Morton termed the “Spanish tinge,” a subtle rhythmic offset that helps prevent the song from becoming overly maudlin. Others, like “Last Leaf” and “Pay Me,” utilize a listless waltz tempo that give the proceedings a stately, timeless quality.
Variation and continuity aside, Tom Waits' style has encompassed so many different elements that even to remain static requires far more versatility than a dozen bands playing in as many different genres could muster. While most of the elements on Bad As Me have been represented on previous albums, there is a constant shift in timbre and mood that prevents the album from becoming tedious. It's not unfamiliar material by any means, but it's constructed in a distinct enough fashion that any sense of redundancy is easy to overlook. Ultimately, it's perhaps not Tom Waits' best album, but it is a solid entry into his canon, a well-executed and consistent work that stands as one more example of how Waits is a unique artist, sculpting songs out of the most easily-overlooked detritus and sounding like nobody else in the process.