Tom Waits

Just like the feeling you get when you find a great video game, I love when I stumble onto some new music.  I especially enjoy it when I show up late to the party and realize that the artist I've only just discovered has a huge catalog of work.  This brongs me to my latest 'find'...Tom Waits.

This guys is great.  Back when Jane and I got engaged a buddy of mine gave me Closing Time.  It's a real depressing album, but it's got a lot of heart and emotion in it.  I was suprised to hear that he was the guy who wrote Goin' out West...as heard in Fight Club and covered by another one of my favorite bands, gomez.  9 months later, I was on a road trip with this same buddy and he gave me 3 live bootlegs.  Now, for those of you who don't know who Tom Waits is, I'll try my best to describe him.  His music is pretty eclectic.  He'll go from slow and smooth, bringing a tear to a grown man's eye, and then another song will have his raspy throaty voice feel like it's drilling into your skull.  Understandibly, it can be a somewhat unpleasant experience...at first.  These live CDs fell into that catagory.  When my buddy was playing them in the car I had to ask him to turn it off after a while.  The quality was shit and the balance was all off, but when I began to listed to them on my own I started to hear his spirit come through.  So, I would listen to them and skip through to the tracks I liked and skip the rest.

This past weekend I went out and bought the CDs where some of the gems were originally released.  Goin' Out West on Bone Machine and 16 Shells from a Thirty-ought Six on Swordfishtrombone.  Holy crap.  First off, the studio quality really helped on these tracks.  It made the good songs great.  Second, I also found so many other great songs on the albums.  Third, these albums are 14 and 23 years old.  There is so much more of this guy to discover.  It's great.