2002: Blood Money - Tom Waits
Looking back at 30 years of music | Tom Waits, Norah Jones, The Flaming Lips, Johnny Cash
The very first time I heard Tom Waits I was sat in the back of my Grandad’s car while we drove back to his house. I don’t remember how old I was but I was little. He told me that there was a new song that he loved and that he wanted to know what I thought of it. After a moment of fiddling with the CD player and skipping through some tracks to find the right one, he turned the volume up as the opening church-bell of Starving in the Belly of a Whale rang out.
The song chugs along, a bouncing graveyard shuffle. The stalking swirl of piano, bass clarinet and harmonica intro was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. As the song built up, my Grandad began gleefully bobbing his shoulders, bouncing his head and dancing along at the wheel. Despite how dark the song is, it is gleeful. It is fun.
It is also utterly terrifying. It is utterly captivating. Waits barks his way through the song. I had no idea what he was singing the first time I heard it. He sounds like the devil has come to earth and really is singing to you from inside the belly of a whale. I didn’t have any idea what to make of any of the song but in that moment, with my Grandad joyfully dancing along, I loved it.
Not long afterwards, I was in my local second hand record and CD shop killing time and looking around when Tom Waits’ name jumped out at me. I didn’t remember the name of the song that I’d liked so much in my Grandad’s car but thought I’d take a chance on one of his albums and see what else of his I liked.
I looked through the CD rack and saw all kinds of strange album names and covers. Bone Machine and Mule Variations and Nighthawks at the Diner. I only had enough money to buy one CD but no idea which album to pick. None of the track titles sounded like they suited the song I was remembering, but there was one album called Swordfishtrombones, and that title was just about as weird as the song as I was after so I took a chance on that.
As soon as I got home, I put the CD on and pressed play. Almost straight away it felt like I’d made a huge mistake. The only money I had for music and this is what I’d bought? It was grotesque. It was horrible and clanging and atonal. It had a marching rhythm that sounded like the Seven Dwarves working on an underworld chain-gang. It was not musical, and it certainly wasn’t as joyful as I remembered his other song being.
At the end of the first song, two minutes in to the album, I took the disc out of the CD player, went back to the shop and asked for a refund. It was another couple years before I came back to the album and realised what a masterpiece I’d been missing out on, and realised that I was going to need to buy it again.
Starving in the Belly of a Whale is, of course, from Blood Money. Quite often, this is my favourite of all of Tom Waits’ weird and scary, crazy and beautiful albums.
I just adore the haunted, off-kilter carnival feel of the record. It sounds like the end of the world, but that’s alright because we’re making a deal with the devil to see us through. It sounds like a skeleton army is on a march towards you. It sounds like Minnie the Moocher has died, decayed and been re-animated.
The tone of the album is set within the first 30 seconds. It’s either a marimba we’re hearing or a xylophone made out of bones. There’s a cascading, phantasmagorical collapse of piano. We hear the crash and echo of bells and gongs, brass and bass clarinets. Waits has taken the place of Charon in the underworld and we are wandering towards the waters of the Styx.
This is the real sweet spot for Tom Waits’ underworld growl. A high point for his low-down voice. There is more earth and gravel and grit in his voice here than on his 80’s releases, more depth and heft and weight. There he was straining (successfully) for depth but here it comes naturally. He sounds all-encompassing, almost Godlike as he sings the devilish, demented Misery’s the River of the World (“Everybody row!”), Everything Goes to Hell, God’s Away on Business and Starving in the Belly of a Whale.
And what lyrics each of these songs have. His albums are always fascinating musically for their experimentation, their singular and characteristic sound, but as well as being a brilliant musician, Waits is also a master poet. He is witty and he is sharp, he is cutting and he is clever, he is curious and he is brilliant.
He is also an incredibly romantic writer. For every song he has written that scares you is one that serenades, for every brawler he has ever written there is a bawler right behind. When talking about the album, Waits said that “I like a beautiful song that tells you terrible things”, and this describes a lot of the songs he has written - especially on this album - but he has also written plenty of beautiful songs that also us beautiful things, as well. Songs like All the World is Green and Coney Island Baby:
Every night she comes
To take me out to dreamland
When I'm with her, I'm the richest
Man in the town
She's a rose, she's a pearl
She's the spin on my world
All the stars make their wishes on her eyes
This is an album full of illusion and allusion. Time and again Waits comes back to themes of humanity (“If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man”), our polluting and destruction of the natural world (“You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it always comes roaring back again”), the battle and balance between good and evil, heaven and earth, right and wrong.
In his own words, “Blood Money is flesh and bone, earthbound. The songs are rooted in reality: jealousy, rage, the human meat wheel”. It's an album that is drenched in blood and death, treachery and deceit (“Don't trust a bull's horn / A doberman's tooth / A runaway horse / Or me”). It’s a political album (“who are the ones that we kept in charge? Killers, thieves and lawyers”) that illuminates all the misery and beauty in the world.
A good man is hard to find, but good songs come easily to Tom Waits.
Elsewhere in 2002…
On the very same day that he released Blood Money, Tom Waits also released the album Alice. He described it as being made up of “adult songs for children, or children's songs for adults” and said that the album is “a maelstrom or fever-dream; a tone poem, with torch songs and waltzes. An odyssey in dream logic and nonsense".
Like Blood Money, the album is made up from songs that Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan wrote for Robert Wilson operas (Alice from 1992’s Alice and Blood Money from 2000’s Woyzeck). Waits said “both are completely unique and different from each other”, which is true and, considering the two albums were made at the same time and with the same musicians, it is impressive just how distinct they are.
Alice is hazier, far more dream-like, experimental and more inaccessible than Blood Money. It’s more disconcerting, and harder to penetrate and navigate than its twin but, like Tom Waits said to David Letterman when promoting his two new releases, “I think you should get both”.
Want to read more about every Tom Waits song? Our friend Ray Padgett has got you covered. You already know about his excellent Bob Dylan substack but just like Blood Money and Alice, you really should get both.
Norah Jones released her debut album, and one of the all time great vocal jazz records, the all-conquering Come Away With Me in 2002. The whole thing is just beautiful, from the sound and the feel and the mood to the playing, the singing, the song selection and sequencing. I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s achingly romantic, it’s heartbreaking and it’s carefree. It’s light and it is beautifully shaded. It is wonderful. Maybe the most perfect lazy Sunday afternoon album there is.
I can remember talking about this record to a friend in school when we were teenagers and them laughing at how un-cool it was to like Norah Jones. I didn’t listen to the record for a while after that, but then later I kept seeing clips of her on YouTube duetting with Willie Nelson or Keith Richards, Bob Dylan and Ray Charles. That’s just about as cool as you can get, and if she was good enough for them then that’s good enough for me.
The Flaming Lips put out their most iconic, most famous and maybe most loved album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Already their tenth release, it felt like the stars really aligned for them here.
It’s experimental enough to be different from their previous work but still grounded in the best parts of their sound up to that point. It felt like the platform here was already in place on 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic but the addition of further electronic elements and pop and hip-hop influences gave an extra dimension to songs like Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt 1.
And, right before the end of the album comes one of the most heartbreaking, beautiful and life-affirming songs you could hope to listen to, Do You Realize ??. Every now and then you should put this song on, close your eyes and really listen to and feel the words, and then go and tell everyone you love that how important they are to you.
Another beautiful and heartbreaking song that came out in 2002 was Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt. Originally by Nine Inch Nails, the song featured on the last album that Cash released in his lifetime, American IV: The Man Comes Around.
Simply, it is one of the most powerful, haunting and affecting recordings that anyone has ever made. Accompanied by a video that is just as powerful, the song is a perfect and fitting end to both Cash’s life and career. Even as close to the end as he was, Johnny Cash had an undimmed power in his voice, and in this, his final statement. He was so of the earth, so poetic and full of God that in everything he did, he made every word, whether his own or someone else’s, feel like The Truth.
Notable album releases
Avril Lavigne - Let Go
Beck - Sea Change
Bruce Springsteen - The Rising
Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head
David Bowie - Heathen
Eminem - The Eminem Show
The Libertines - Up the Bracket
Missy Elliott - Under Construction
Ms Dynamite - A Little Deeper
Nas - God’s Son
Next Week: The Strokes return with their second album, Warren Zevon leaves us with his last and we look at some huge singles from Beyonce, The White Stripes and the Kings of Leon.
Very similar to my Tom origin story! Sometimes it takes a couple tries