What I’ve always loved about Tom Waits is his ability to sound like a cross between the granddaddies of the blues and a maniacal villain from a horror movie– cackling and playing the organ whilst some unsuspecting blonde beauty awakens to discover she’s been chained to a table. It’s the way his backbeats thump, his voice scratches between mournful and wizened, and reverberates with a raw anger and resentment. “Bad As Me”, Waits’s first new studio recording in seven years, delivers on all these points.
But listening to “Bad As Me” prompts me to stress the heart of the prowess of the Waits and Kathleen Brennan songwriting duo. “Kiss Me” uses all of its instrumentals as a means to demonstrate the chiaroscuro of Waits’s voice, highlighting and shadowing his vocals exactly where needs be. Piano, bass, and guitar weave in and out of the melody line, each instrument acting as both harmony and syncopation in all the proper places. It’s this understanding of each line of music in a song as a part of a cohesive whole that provides the foundation for Waits’s lyrical performances.
Sometimes Waits, on paper, seems to be speaking his own language, but heard in song he is universally communicative. Take title track “Bad As Me”, where a series of metaphors that have to be heard to be understood flow one upon the other –“You’re the fly in my beer… you’re the letter from Jesus on the bathroom wall… you’re mother superior, with only a bra”. This sort of lyric writing shouldn’t come as a surprise from the man who revelled in his ‘difficult’ reputation upon his induction to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame: “they say that I have no hits and that I’m difficult to work with. And they say that like it’s a bad thing.”
One element of what makes Waits’s music so resilient is its subtle diversity: he has this rich, clearly identifiable sound, mostly due his voice, but his music also maintains a transient quality, slipping between classic country, rock ‘n’ roll, traditional blues, and, on occasion, a horror movie score. That maleability is really evident on “Bad As Me”. “Back in the Crowd” reminds me of old school country, in the vein of Merle, Patsy, and a bit of Waylon. “Talking At The Same Time” laments with a wry smile: “If all the news is bad, is there any other kind?” The beat in “Face to the Highway” has this relentless, steady quality. Waits’s voice is melodic, complimented by a long-twanging guitar, lending the track an ethereal, haunted sound that, to me at least, communicates the stretching, seemingly infinite expanse of the highway. “Last Leaf” has the kind of melancholia of a lullaby– a slow, wistful mourning.
Towards the end of the album is “Hell Broke Luce”. Full disclosure: I love a good pun, so I was a sucker for this track before I’d even heard it. The track draws on schoolyard rhyming and clapping games, selective repetition, and a rhythm based on an infantry march. You just want to march right on with it, despite the violent anger of the lyrics. Left, right, left, right…
Waits knows how to structure an album. He brings you in with a bold, rhythmic opener, then shifts to a quieter, seemingly more intimate musical space. You’re traveling along with his beat. You’re in line with his anger. You taste his pain. You’re always slightly creeped out, though you’re never quite sure why. In the end, you have to get comfortable with the fact that Waits is in the drivers seat, and you’re just along for the ride.
