Tom Waits has completed a groundbreaking new CD for ANTI-

Tuesday July 6, 2004

June 30, 2004

Academy Award nominated and Grammy Award winner, Tom Waits has been long considered one of music�s most influential artists because he has continuously created music outside of fad or fashion. With REAL GONE, his off-road adventures are taken into the further beyond. Mixing and mashing: worlds both sonic and ethnic, musical traditions both new and old, and rhythms both mouth-made and sampled from his own instruments, Waits has reached a new pinnacle.

Written and produced by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, his wife and long-time collaborator, REAL GONE features 15 tracks of funk, Jamaican rock-steady, blues both urban and rural, rhythms and melodies both Latin and African and, for the first time, no piano.

The crash and collide of rhythms and genres within a song creates a hybrid unlike any music he has made before. The comic, funky, hip-hop/r&b inspired instructional dance number, �Metropolitan Glide� (�now show your teeth, bray like a calf/Then kill me with your machine gun laugh�) and the sonic mayhem and nonsense rhyme ride to �Top of the Hill� (why don�t you give me another cup of that soup?/Turn a Rolls Royce into a chicken coop�) are both punctuated by a live band and turntable playing along to Waits� home recorded voice percussion.

Lyrically and musically the kinetic songs play against the haunting lull of the ballads. The epic, ominous and hypnotic Jamaican rock-steady groove of, �Sins of the Father,� follows the dark trails of straying, passed on from generation to generation, from those at the top to those at the bottom and back around again, echoing a theme of the record.

While Waits has traditionally used his voice as an actor, inhabiting each song with a different vocal character, on numerous songs here, he also uses it as chugging, sputtering, wheezing syncopated engine of sound and rhythm that can explode like a string of sidewalk firecrackers or sound like the indecipherable incantations of a street corner shaman.

REAL GONE is a phrase that describes a place, a time beyond reach: a lost mind, a renegade leader, war love sublime, love lost, death, desire, escape. These are the themes of the record inspired by the giddy lust, high voltage, out of orbit times---a vertigo of splash and trash popular culture spinning alongside the gun to our head and the knife in our heart political times or as �Shake It� says, �I feel like a preacher waving a gun around.�

REAL GONE is also an expression used by musicians to describe the experience of playing and losing yourself to the place where you can finally be found.

In a musical career that has spanned four decades and over 20 albums �Waits has,� according the Los Angeles Times Robert Hilburn, �come through it all with a body of work that stamps him clearly as one of the most important figures of the modern pop era.� REAL GONE adds more weight to that claim.

Tom Waits Artist Page