Covered: Tom Waits, Volume 4: 2013-2023

Here's the fourth and last album in the Covered series celebrating the songs of Tom Waits by collecting cover versions.

Once again, I have to thank Fabio from Rio for being the prime mover behind putting these Waits albums together. He selected a large number of songs, and I narrowed it down to a reasonable amount. And one again, Fabio was nice enough to do the write up. So, take it away, Fabio:

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Waits released his last studio record to date ("Bad as Me") in 2011. His later works revisit all earlier phases in fragmented, refined form. Waits alternates tender ballads with abrasive rhythm experiments, presenting a distilled, self-aware summary of his artistic language rather than a new stylistic break.

This last volume with performances from the 2010s and 2020s is mostly filled with female voices, hinting that, musically, Waits has become something of a ladies' man — at least for a younger generation of singers.

Here again we have a wild range of different styles, from forties-like doo-wop (Ice Cream Man) to eighties-drum-machine-electro-pop ("All Stripped Down"), from jazz and blues rock ("Fumblin' with the Blues", "Shore Leave") to americana and alt-country ("Walk Away", "Blue Skies").

We will also find adult contemporary ("In-Between Love"), dark cabaret ("Little Drop of Poison", "Starving in the Belly of a Whale"), R&B ("Such a Scream"), and confessional ballad ("Martha") in the mix.

Tom Jones makes "Bad as Me" his own. "Emotional Weather Report" is a deep cut taken from the little-known jazz and spoken-word Waits seventies album "Nighthawks on the Radio", which highlights Tom Waits' deadpan humor. 

Other standouts are Rosanne Cash's "Time" and Aimee Mann's version for "Hold On" - which kind of reminded me, in spirit if not in sound, of the acappella version sung by Emily Kinney as Beth Greene in "The Walking Dead" - one of the most poignant moments of the entire series(*). 

(*) You can check it out (along with Tom Waits' original version) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNeGLUAUbgQ&list=RDGNeGLUAUbgQ 

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This album is 55 minutes long.

01 Walk Away (Steel Wheels)
02 Bad as Me (Tom Jones)
03 Emotional Weather Report (Marissa Mulder)
04 All Stripped Down (Lisa Bassenge)
05 Ice Cream Man (Hazelnuts)
06 Blue Skies (Lisa Bassenge)
07 In Between Love (Jennifer Porter)
08 Such a Scream (Good Paper of Rev. Rob Mortimer)
09 Fumblin' with the Blues (Natascha & the Spy Boys)
10 Little Drop of Poison (Ellie Gunn and the Firethornes)
11 Hold On (Aimee Mann)
12 Time (Rosanne Cash)
13 Starving in the Belly of a Whale (Belladone)
14 Martha (Jackie Greene)
15 Shore Leave (Nickel)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/QwFCJsny 

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/qn4qIm97mvtE5WO/file

The cover photo is a screenshot I took from a video of an interview he did around 2020.