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Tom Waits was featured on today’s segment of the NPR show Fresh Air. The iconic artist talked with host Terry Gross about his phenomenal new record Bad As Me, his first all-new studio album in eight years and his 20th album.
On Getting Older Waits offers, “I guess I’ve always lived upside down when I want things I can’t have. My wife actually thinks I have a syndrome called Reality Distortion Field. It’s kind of like drugs, only you can’t come back from it. Reality Distortion is almost a permanent condition. Things come in and they go out: Presto, chango! To a certain extent, I did that with myself. As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.”
And on Collaborating With Keith Richards he says, “There’s nobody in the world like him. We wrote songs together for a while and that was fun. I had never really written with anybody besides my wife, so it was unique and a little scary at first. He doesn’t really remember anything or write anything down. So you play for an hour and he would yell across the room, ‘Scribe!’ And I looked around. ‘Scribe? Who’s the scribe?’ And he’d say it again, now pointing at me. I was supposed to have written down everything we said and dreamt of and played. And I realized we needed an adult in the room. I’ve never been the one that one would consider the adult. It was an interesting dynamic.”
Listen to the full interview above or at NPR by going here. Read More
Today is the day! Tom Waits' new album Bad As Me is here. The CD, deluxe limited edition CD with 3 more songs and LP are available at your favorite retail store. You can always get everything here at the Tom Waits StoreRead More
Remember when people got together to listen to music out of the same speaker? Well, your local independent record store does and they're inviting you to come together in one of the few remaining tabernacles of sound and listen to Tom Waits' Bad As Me. With the release of Bad As Me this Monday, 10/24, some of our favorite indie stores are holding special listening parties, combined with some cool giveaways and general indie-store friendliness. See below for a list of events. Read More

An informative and entertaining interview with Tom Waits just appeared in the New York Times. The piece features Tom and the writer driving around in Tom’s car littered with “a yellowing newspaper announcing the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, a large bottle of Valencia Mexican hot sauce and a bowler hat and a glittery sequined jacket” as they talk about Tom’s amazing new album Bad As Me. Some sample bits below…
“Talking about the album now ‘is like doing the dishes,” he said. “The meal has already been prepared and eaten. We enjoyed it. But after every meal, clang, clack, clang, scrape, clang, clang, clack, scrape — you’ve got to do the dishes.’ Compared with “Real Gone,” an album full of songs that clanged, scraped and bristled with distortion and cryptic lyrics, “Bad as Me” climbs off the ledge. “There’s less phlegm and there’s less smoke in the room.”
“Mr. Waits was seeking to write, he said, “dwell-in songs,” a phrase used by a woman he learned about in a collection of folk songs from Alabama. “Like a blues, you get down there and you start dwelling on a particular topic,” he said. “I was really taken with that, that it was something simple and it evoked so much.”
You can read to entire article here. Read More

(Christopher Serra)
Tom Waits recently met with the Wall Street Journal at a local Chinese restaurant to talk about his phenomenal new album Bad As Me which comes out October 24th.
A sample: “The public Mr. Waits is a bona fide character, a stomping, yowling beatnik who reflects the eccentric, downtrodden characters he sings about. Over lunch, he relaxes and a natural storyteller emerges. He riffs on an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” tells an anecdote about Lauren Bacall, and insists that a dead shark was once cut open in Barbados with a VCR in its stomach containing a tape of “Jaws.”
To read the entire interview, just go here. Read More
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