Perhaps Waits should have let the tracks quietly swap places perhaps he should simply have let some of them drift away. Similarly, Blood Money's least characterful songs, the soppy Lullaby and the listless Woe, are as muted as Alice's ballads. The former sounds like Berlin cabaret's last dance the latter is a splendidly unsavoury middle-European folk tale. And Alice's strangest songs, Kommienezuspadt and Reeperbahn, seem completely out of place. The strongest songs on Alice - We're All Mad Here, the menacing waltz Everything You Can Think, the romantic title track - ooze the bleak vision and dark passions that swarm through Blood Money. "I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby, for a buck," snipes God's Away on Business, while Starving in the Belly of a Whale warns: "If you live in hope you're dancing to a terrible tune." Best of all is Misery Is the River of the World, a sinister twist of marimba and blurting bass clarinet, wheezes from an ancient calliope and bubbles of percussion from an Indonesian pod, over which Waits gleefully puffs: "Misery's the river of the world - everybody row!" Waits and Brennan dive into the corrupt, merciless world of Woyzeck with relish their lyrics are perkily savage, cheerfully nihilistic. This is less of a problem with Blood Money because its songs are more varied, complex and eccentric in tone. Even the wonderful Table Top Joe, a spry ditty that Waits sings as though impersonating Louis Armstrong on Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes, seems richer when you know that it is really sung by the drug-addled Caterpillar giving Alice a lesson in idealism. The wistful ballads Poor Edward, Lost in the Harbour and Fish and Bird feel meandering without a visual accompaniment to bolster them. Divorced of their context, many of Alice's songs sound weak. On the album, We're All Mad Here is sung by Waits in a tidily gruff voice no mention is made in the accompanying lyric booklet of the characters that inspired it. Sung in the play by the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse, it begins with the words, "Hang me in a bottle like a cat," and ends claiming: "We're all inside a decomposing train/ And your eyes will die like fish."
The first lines of Alice's title track set the tone: "It's dreamy weather we're on/ You wave your crooked wand/ Along an icy pond/ With a frozen moon/ A murder of silhouette crows." From there on the lyrics get curiouser and curiouser, reaching a peak with We're All Mad Here. His songs have long been preoccupied with society's outsiders, with murder and desire, and he and Brennan share with Lewis Carroll a linguistic playfulness, a delight in choppy syntax and warped juxtapositions. Looking back, it is clear that Waits was peculiarly suited to both projects. Alice's mournful ballads all seem to be haunted by ghosts of albums past the best songs on Blood Money merrily rework the skewed rhythms and whirling textures that are Waits's trademark. Through all the experiments that began with 1983's Swordfishtrombones, Waits has maintained a distinct musical voice, an idiosyncratic way of yoking sounds together. But what Alice and Blood Money also highlight is the consistency of Waits's songwriting, and the extent to which Kathleen Brennan, his wife and co-writer of every song here, shares his vision. Despite the gap between composition, the albums share so many characteristics that it's not always clear which play inspired what song.īearing in mind that both albums were recorded in the same sessions, share the same musicians and use much the same instrumentation, the similarities are hardly surprising. Blood Money's songs were first heard in 2000, in Wilson's equally fragmented reading of Woyzeck.
Alice's songs date back to a 1992 production, a fractured reflection on Alice Liddell's relationship with Lewis Carroll that plays hopscotch on the texts of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. That was the first time Waits and Wilson worked together Alice and Blood Money commemorate their second and third outings. And the album that preceded Mule Variations was The Black Rider, soundtrack to a theatre collaboration with William Burroughs and avant-garde director Richard Wilson. More peculiarly, he composed the soundtrack to a short animated film called Bunny. Instead his music lurks on film soundtracks: he has written songs for movies by Tim Robbins, Wim Wenders and Barry Levinson. His 1999 album Mule Variations was his first in six years. Then he spent the next two decades blithely breaking the rules. For the first decade of his career, Tom Waits conformed to that loyally. They release an album, they tour, they release another, they tour some more. Most musicians follow the same career path.