Tom Waits i avisa

I New York Times

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.

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.”

A waltz called “Last Leaf” — with Mr. Richards joining on vocals — celebrates the image of a lone leaf clinging to a tree: “The autumn took the rest but they won’t take me,” Mr. Waits sings. It’s tempting to hear it as a manifesto of stubborn persistence, but Mr. Waits shrugged that off.

“It was a tree, and there was one leaf left on the tree, and I wondered: ‘Wow, if you can make it through winter, you may be here until next year. Wouldn’t that be great, if you were just the only guy that hung on?’ ” he said. “I guess you could say everything’s a metaphor for everything else, but sometimes it’s just what it is. It’s just what it’s about — about a tree.”

I Washington Post

"Sometimes you tell a musician 'I want to hear what comes to you.' You don't even tell them what you want them to play." On "Get Lost," Mr. Waits said, "David played a riff that sounds like a Ray Charles Wurlitzer. But he didn't play it again." Ms. Brennan found it on the recording of an earlier take. "She said, 'This is the foundation.'"

The arrangement of "Chicago," the album's opener, is built on a banjo figure by Mr. Waits. "I made it sound like an old-time train bell. That stayed in. We built on it. We started a groove."