This tribute to Tom Waits is being issued a couple of weeks before his 70th birthday as an elite group of female artists find the beauty and magic in his songs on Come On Up to the House: Women Sing Waits. The results will likely startle you. The imagery you associate with Waits – the trashcan lid, the dark shadows in the burlesque club, the alley strewn with empty liquor bottles, the water-stained paperback poetry book alongside a lone piano player, the midnight neon lights, and most importantly, the greasy, growling raspy voice all have been replaced with a beauty that shines light on the inherent lyrical strength of his songs. These women are some of our best singer-songwriters – Joseph, Aimee Mann, Phoebe Bridgers, Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer, Angie McMahon, Corrine Bailey Rae, Patty Griffin, Rosanne Cash, Kat Edmonson, Iris DeMent, Courtney Marie Andrews and The Wild Reeds (in the order of track sequence).
The album is produced by artist, author, composer and lifelong Tom Waits fan Warren Zane, who also wrote the deeply insightful and personal liner notes. The essay is so well constructed that it is risky to pull a few excerpts. But, here’s to trying. He begins by talking about how his mother fell in love with the early Tom Waits records and introduced him to his brothers and sisters – “We didn’t need training to see the craft in Waits’ writing. There weren’t a lot of Cole Porters left standing by pianos, scribbling unexpected rhymes, making language crackle, standing characters up and making them walk toward the listener. When a songwriter who does all that came along, you took note.”
He talks about the process of making the album – “I kept trying to get artists to consider the more up-tempo, greasy material, some of that funny Waits stuff with the garbage can lid snare drum. Every artist thought about it for a moment. Then they’d come back with their favorite, the one they just had to do. And it was always a ballad, something special to them, some song that had been a walking stick as they’d gone through a dark part of the forest. I couldn’t control it. It became an album of ballads…Or, as I began to realize halfway through the process, an album of spirituals. Spirituals, music of and for the spirit. That’s how this remarkable collection of performers had taken these songs in and how they brought them back out again, as spirituals.”
Portland trio Joseph opens with a solemn take on the title track, followed by Aimee Mann’s warm emotive reading of “Hold On” Phoebe Bridgers digs deep on the heart wrenching “Georgia Lee” while sisters Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer sing together as they usually do, with Shelby in lead and Allison on high harmony for “Ol’ 55.” Rosanne Cash puts her signature spin on “Time” while Iris DeMent finds the fragility in “The House Where Nobody Lives” and makes it even more melancholy than the original. Corrine Baily Rae takes the song that may be more closely associated with Springsteen, “Jersey Girl.”
Kat Edmonson takes “You Can Never Hold Back Spring” into dreamland. Patty Griffin can always be counted on and here she delivers one of the clear standout tracks in “Ruby’s Arms.” The soulful, gospel-inflected vocals of Courtney Marie Andrews are well suited to “Downtown Train,” like the former, a single that’s already been released.
Again, you won’t find the horn-drenched, jazzy, beat poet side of Waits here. This is calming reflective music as Zanes pointed out when he spoke of the momentum the project took on toward ballads and spirituals. As such, this is a rather unique tribute album, it’s not what you may have expected. Let’s turn again to Zanes in his liners. “The Waits songs I was hearing through these women were breathing differently and deeply. In just the way Dylan cuts the definitive version but never stakes out the song’s territory in a way that leaves no room for majestic covers, the recordings I was gathering were showing me the remarkable strength, the resonance of Waits’ stuff. No one took ownership of the material, it was all on loan, still belonged to Tom Waits. But what a series of loans! And that’s how it is with the very, very best songs. It all brought me back to the Tom Waits I’d begun to see an outline of as a young man, back to the Waits my mother brought into the family dining room. That strange and beautiful character who seemed to belong to no one. Who I now believe belongs to us all.”
After listening to this album, it may change your impression of Tom Waits too.
