That's right. October 25th is the day Tom Waits' first studio album in seven years arrives. Bad As Me will almost certainly be a contender for album of the year, as Tom Waits is quite easily the most consistent musician of the modern era -- and that's not just my incredible bias talking, either! My love for his music aside, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes Waits has more than a couple bad albums, and for a man with a 22 album catalogue spanning five decades, that's a remarkable accomplishment. I'd argue that he only has two bad albums (Small Change, and One From the Heart) as well as a poorly executed live album (Big Time), but I can find merit in every other release, and I'd put a half dozen of them among the greatest albums ever recorded.
If you love jazz, blues, singer-songwriters, and the dozens of other genres Waits has dabbled in over the decades, if you're interested in possibly the most versatile (in an unconventional sense) singer in music, you need to listen to a Tom Waits album. It doesn't hurt that Waits is in Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen territory as far as songwriters go, either.
Here's a press release for Bad As Me, as well as two songs from the album and a satirical listening party video:
Bad As Me is Tom Waits first studio album of all new music in seven years. This pivotal work refines the music that has come before and signals a new direction. Waits, in possibly the finest voice of his career, worked with a veteran team of gifted musicians and longtime co-writer/producer Kathleen Brennan. From the opening horn-fueled chug of Chicago, to the closing barroom chorale of New Years Eve, Bad As Me displays the full career range of Waits songwriting, from beautiful ballads like Last Leaf, to the avant cinematic soundscape of Hell Broke Luce, a battlefront dispatch. On tracks like Talking at the Same Time, Waits shows off a supple falsetto, while on blues burners like Raised Right Men and the gospel tinged Satisfied he spits, stutters and howls. Like a good boxer, these songs are lean and mean, with strong hooks and tight running times. A pervasive sense of players delighting in each others musical company brings a feeling of loose joy even to the albums saddest songs.
[Listening Party]
["Bad As Me"]
["Back in the Crowd"]
...
Oh, right. Something else comes out that Tuesday, too! The latest -- and possibly greatest, given the reception in Japan upon release -- Haruki Murakami novel, 1Q84. I'd put Murakami on a very short list of world's greatest living authors, and despite his status as a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, his prose is more than approachable. 1Q84 might not be the best place to start with Murakami given its size (I believe it nears 1000 pages), but you have plenty of time to head to a library and pick up one of his shorter novels, like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood (my favourite), Kafka on the Shore, or After Dark.
A few links on 1Q84:
http://www.omnivoracious.com/2011/10/knopf-publisher-sonny-mehta-on-.html
"Haruki Murakami is a rarity in publishing. A contemporary writer of mind-bending fiction whose remarkable ability to blur the lines between fantasy and reality have earned him a cult following, not only in his native Japan, but in every country where his books are published. He is a literary superstar."
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2011/09/05/110905fi_fiction_murakami?currentPage=1 [An excerpt, titled "Town of Cats']
http://www.amazon.com/1Q84-Haruki-Murakami/dp/0307593312/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318401490&sr=1-1 [just $16!]
get hype
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ICON:
I'm pretty serious about chocobos.