The Fat Angel Sings

The Tom Waits fanbase is not entirely starved for news lately, but most of it is about Waits’s acting career. On the music side, the news is small change: something about singing on a new Pogues tribute, and similar tidbits.

Then came the announcement of “Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow”, a star-studded tribute to the music of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. OK, it’s not new original music (we’ve waited 15 years for a new Waits album) but whatever it is, we’ll take it!

The excitement gives way, on closer inspection, to disappointment: there’s nothing actually new in this new release. (“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away,” to borrow a classic Waits-as-huckster phrase.)

Each cover has been available for years–in many cases, for three or four decades. The most recent of the tracks on hand is “Hold On” by Madison Cunningham, but even that one dates back six years. It’s a killer version, by the way, a clear highlight of this compilation.

Still, having these covers compiled in one place serves a purpose, if only to help reassess the song catalogue. And realistically, the number of Waits devotees who have actually listened to all these songs is miniscule; they could fit in a single booth at an all-night diner. If a song is new to you, then it’s new music, regardless of its original release date.

The very title of the album suggests a new framing, a fresh lens: the notion that Waits’s song-writing changed when he partnered with Brennan, and their extensive and lengthy collaboration deserves its own celebration.

The album opens with Bruce Springsteen in concert in 1981 at Meadowlands in New Jersey. The location matters, because the song is “Jersey Girl.” Waits had released it the previous year, but Springsteen quickly came to own it. He cleans up the unsanitized language that Waits used; he sings his own lines here and there, which you get to do when you are the Boss. He gets help from a stadium full of Jersey girls and boys who cheer raucously on that triumphant line “Down the shore everything’s all right.”

With this opener the album breaks its own rules: “Jersey Girl” is not a Waits/Brennan composition, it was written by Waits alone. But the song is about Kathleen Brennan, who was living in New Jersey at the time they met. For all its rhapsodic “sha-la-la”-ing, the lyric correctly predicts they’d eventually marry.

From there the album runs chronologically through the couple’s songbook. We get two or three selections from each of the studio albums they released to date, from the magnificent ’80s trifecta–“Swordfishtrombone”s (‘83), “Rain Dogs” (‘85), and “Frank’s Wild Years” (‘87)–through to “Real Gone” (2004). Except that “Bone Machine” is represented by only one track, The Ramones tearing through “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up.” For some reason, “Bad as Me” (2011) gets overlooked entirely–another disappointment. Also getting a pass are the collaborations with Robert Wilson, the avant-garde director (so, no songs from “Black Rider”, “Blood Money“, or “Alice“). Treating that material separate from the rest seems like a good call.

The inclusion of Waits/Brennan songs written for other artists (or recorded first by them) invigorates the mid-section of the album. Three songs are in this “orphans” category: one is Marianne Faithful on “Strange Weather,” the title track to her 1987 album. Produced by the mercurial Hal Willner and featuring eclectic guitarist Robert Quine, it provides the most artful four minutes of music on the compilation. “Diamond in Your Mind” (2002) was written for Solomon Burke, who pours his considerable soul into the piece. Finally, Waits/Brennan wrote “Down There by the Train” for Johnny Cash, who rightly takes it as a spiritual, an “outlaw hymn” as Cash called it. These latter two songs were later recorded by Waits himself and surfaced on the three-disc “Orphans” release in 2006, where they got a bit lost in the shuffle.

“Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow” seems well-balanced, too, in its stylistic distribution. Gut-bucket blues, tangos and other Afro-Caribbean rhythms, spoken-word pieces, gospel hymns, nursery rhymes, and sappy love ballads–Waits/Brennan explored all those modes and more.

In Waits’s opinion, his songs divide into “Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards,” and all are present here in strong doses. Norah Jones on “The Long Way Home” and Lucinda Williams’s “Hang Down Your Head” had me crying so hard I had to put the needle back on “Gin-Soaked Boy” by Southside Johnny to get my senses back on. For the Latin tinge that Waits embraced in the ’80s, Diana Krall slays on “Temptation,” aided by a slick band not afraid to get nasty. For the spoken-word element, how about “Jockey Full Of Bourbon” as performed by Los Lobos, complete with age-old nursery rhyme chorus.

If there’s something imbalanced about compilation, it’s that the roster skews geriatric. A few Gen X, Y, and Z artists would have added spark, and testified to Waits/Brennan’s continued relevance. Part of the issue is simple nepotism, with several of the artists being old friends of the family. David Hidalgo (Los Lobos) played on a number of Tom Waits albums. John Hammond and Southside Johnny both issued full-length Waits tribute albums in the past, with Waits becoming personally involved with both. And now here they are on the new tribute. Fair enough, I guess, but it does come at the expense of emerging artists (or anyone under the age of 50).

Springsteen brings it on “Jersey Girl” (he was 31 at the time), as does Madison Cunningham on “Hold On” (she is still in her twenties). For my money, hers is the album’s strongest track. Norah Jones in her dignified manner has a youthful vibrancy. But most of the other artists were well past their prime. There’s a reason Willie Nelson teamed with Kimmie Rhodes, and Robert Plant teamed with Alison Krauss on their contributions–they wanted youth/age balance, and that’s the kind of mix I wanted more of on “Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow”.

Tracks

Jersey Girl – Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band (Live at Meadowlands Arena, NJ – July 1981)
16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six – Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band
Gin-Soaked Boy – Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes
Jockey Full Of Bourbon – Los Lobos
Hang Down Your Head – Lucinda Williams
Temptation – Diana Krall
Yesterday Is Here – Bettye LaVette
Way Down In The Hole – The Blind Boys Of Alabama
Strange Weather – Marianne Faithfull
I Don’t Want To Grow Up – Ramones
Down There By The Train – Johnny Cash
House Where Nobody Lives – King Ernest
Picture In A Frame – Willie Nelson
Hold On – Madison Cunningham
The Long Way Home – Norah Jones
2:19 – John Hammond
Diamond In Your Mind – Solomon Burke
Trampled Rose – Alison Kraus and Robert Plant
Day After Tomorrow – Joan Baez

Appearing on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge, Phoebe Bridgers played two of her new songs and included a Nirvana cover for good measure. Recorded before her appendicitis diagnosis, Bridgers played her first widely available live performance of “Bobby,” from her new album “Lost Weekend“. She also played the album’s first single, “Lost Boys.”

Bridgers then played a cover of Nirvana’s “Lithium,” from their 1991 album, “Nevermind”. The performance features just Bridgers’ voice and a guitar, making an intimate song sound even more intimate. Full video of the performance hasn’t been released yet, but the BBC has aired the audio.

While her appendicitis forced the cancellation of her UK shows, her bigger “The Lost Tour” doesn’t kick off for another month, so she may be able to make up the dates before then. “Lost Weekend”, Bridgers’ third album, was just released on August 14th.

Garage rock duo Fountain shares “It’s Ordinary,” a raw, gritty offering rooted in their signature high-energy musicality. Built around the duo’s instinctive chemistry, the track blends crunching guitar tones, driving drums and distinctive vocal delivery to create a track that feels visceral and a brimming with a sense of immediacy. 

Formed by drummer and backing vocalist Alistair Wilkinson and guitarist/vocalist Jordan Noon, the duo weaves a soundscape that’s as precise as it gritty, framing soaring instrumentals with a touch of unpredictability. A catchy offering that builds with a relentless pace that adds to the spontaneity at the core of the production, the track is cinematic, atmospheric and edgy all at once. 

Having quickly established themselves as a compelling presence within the UK’s alternative scene, Fountain continue to build on their momentum with an uncompromising passion and power-packed sonic sensibilities.

U2 has released a brand new cover of the Pogues’ “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.”

It’s part of the upcoming tribute album “20th Century Paddy: The Songs of Shane MacGowan“, which also includes contributions from Bruce Springsteen (“A Rainy Night in Soho”), Tom Waits (“Summer in Siam”), Primal Scream (“A Pair of Brown Eyes”) and many more.

You can listen to U2’s new cover, The Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan passed away on November. 30th, 2023 at the age of 65.

“Shane MacGowan was full of contradictions — and that’s where the truth of him lived,” U2’s the Edge shared in a press release. “He could be precise about what mattered and gloriously careless about everything else. If that sounds like a kind of performance, maybe it was. But as Oscar Wilde put it, ‘a mask tells us more than a face.'”

“20th Century Paddy – The Songs Of Shane MacGowan” will be released on November. 13th. At least half of proceeds made from the album will go toward the Dublin Simon Community, an organization that supports those experiencing homelessness in Dublin.

“What he did with that voice was remarkable,” the Edge continued. “He pulled together threads that shouldn’t quite fit — folk tradition, political memory, gallows humour, romance — and made them sound inevitable.”

Official lyric video of ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’ performed by U2. Written by Shane MacGowan.

Scotland’s incomparable and influential Arab Strap are back with their ninth studio album “Half-Told Tales“: almost exactly 30 years since the beloved duo’s debut single “The First Big Weekend” was released. “Half-Told Tales” is rich with Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton’s trademark wit and dark humour, whilst creating moments from quiet brooding to a self-described “disco-metal incantation that might make you dance.” The album was recorded with long-time collaborator Paul Savage (Mogwai, Belle and Sebastian, Franz Ferdinand). As they say: “We’re 30 years old this year, so we decided to celebrate by doing what we enjoy most: by making new music.”

The new single by Arab Strap “Glamour Magick Taken” from the forthcoming album “Half-Told Tales”, out 4th September

@ (pronounced “at”) is the art-folk project of Philadelphia-based multi-instrumentalist songwriters Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak. On October 16th, the band will share their new album “Autosmile”, their second full-length record and first release with 4AD Records.

Across Autosmile’s 11 songs, @ reimagine the psychedelic folk tradition as an undeniably contemporary art form, carefully balancing beauty and pain and shifting between black hole heaviness and patient understanding.

“Autosmile” follows @’s 2021 debut album “Mind Palace Music” — displaying the duo’s penchant for confessional lyrics and affinity for blending digital and analog elements, the album was an organic success story via word of mouth praise and well-deserved press recognition.

In 2024, @ released their subsequent EP “Are You There God? It’s Me”, @, where they diverted from their usual acoustic instrumentation to soul-searching on a sonic side quest into more electronic music. In the time since, the band has become an in-demand live act with support shows alongside Snail Mail, Cameron Winter, and Black Country New Road.

‘Autosmile’ taken from @’s debut 4AD album of the same title, out 16th October, via 4AD.

You have to wonder why Railcard took so long to be born: their debut album feels like it should have been in your collection for years. But it wasn’t until 2025 that Rachel Love (Dolly Mixture), Ian Button and Peter Momtchiloff (Heavenly) met at a gig, realised that they were exactly the same age, and decided that this was an excellent reason to form a new band.  The shared history, the same pop references, the parallel lives… Railcard had to happen, and there was no time to lose.  “Two Steps At A Time” – the album title and theme song – express exactly how quickly Railcard have worked since then – jumping over pavement cracks and whistling past graveyards to get these songs written, recorded and released while they are still sweet and fresh. 

The band released three digital EPs in early 2026, which were then gathered onto a CD and released by Skep Wax and Slumberland. The CDs sold out very quickly. (New copies will be made available to coincide with the album release.) The critical response to a mail-order-only CD was far greater than anyone expected.

Railcard made their live debut in December 2025 and had by then recruited their fourth member: Allison Thomson (Trash Can Sinatras, The Love Band), whose flawless trumpet and swirly keyboard-playing complete the Railcard sound, allowing the band to fulfil the significant ambition and range of the songs, which are mostly co-written and often co-sung by Love and Button.  “Flannelette” and “Sunday Sun”, delicate and swoony, could almost be Slapp Happy at their most Bacharach. “Foxy”, mysterious and charming, has more than a hint of Kate Bush December magic.

The raucous duet “I’m A Disaster” is The Kinks meets deadpan Shangri-Las.  The title track could have been an alternative theme tune for Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads. “Runaround” is like a school choir doing The Raincoats. “Unstable Neighbour”, mesmerising and insistent: it might make you think of Stereolab; we might imagine an indiepop Hawkwind.  Peter Momtchiloff also contributes two wonderful songs on the album: the fragile and hallucinatory “Paper Thin” and the Love-meets-Undertones rush of “Hillman Minx”.

As with the first EPs, Railcard enlisted the sonic services of Medway psych expert Allan Crockford (of The Prisoners, JTQ and many more) who has delivered mixes that pump with vintage valve energy and reverby depth.

“Two Steps At A Time” is released on Skep Wax and Slumberland September 18th, and the band have a string of UK dates through the summer and Autumn.

Ian Button also performs with The Penrose Web, Heavenly, Swansea Sound and The Catenary Wires. Peter Momtchiloff also performs with Heavenly and Would-be-goods.

Railcard are Rachel Love (Dolly Mixture), Ian Button (Death In Vegas), Peter Momtchiloff (Heavenly/Would-be-goods) and Allison Thomson (Trashcan Sinatras).

Big Truck is the project of Laurie Vincent, stepping away from the intensity of Soft Play to explore a more melodic and reflective sound. Created with long time friend Sam Coppins and a close-knit group of collaborators, the band’s songs blend jangling indie-pop hooks with expansive arrangements and a warm, offbeat character.

“Midday at the Middleway” is a debut album rooted in honesty and self-acceptance. Its songs reflect on mistakes, contradictions and the uncertainty of everyday life, balancing humour, vulnerability and quiet optimism. Drawing on classic British indie influences while carving out its own identity, Big Truck offers a collection of direct, thoughtful songs that find comfort in the messy middle ground.

Formed alongside longtime friend Sam Coppins and a tight-knit group of players, the band feels both instinctive and expansive. Their music blends jangled hooks reminiscent of The Cure and The Smiths with richer, widescreen textures, all anchored by lyrics that are candid, wry, and deeply human – balancing life’s small joys with its inevitable lows.

Big Truck’s debut “Midday at the Middleway” is immediate and unpolished in the best way. It’s an album about acceptance of mistakes, of contradictions, of the messy middle ground, and the quiet confidence that comes with it.

“Gotta Get Out” is The Linda Lindas’ third album, and immediately, you hear a far bigger leap from than there was from their first album. From the ballads, to the surf guitar, to the golden-ticket guest performance (rhymes with Shmayley Shmilliams), to the Eloise Wong-penned hardcore beatdowns, and all the way to the more nuanced lyrics where the personal purrs against the political… everything has stepped up for the LA quartet.

The Linda Lindas don’t write bratty-kid punk anthems – they never did, really. But these songs are weightier and further from that designation than ever.

Part of this might be explained by the band members hitting consequential ages, when everything starts barreling by and it’s only later that you can make sense of it. Bela Salazar, the oldest, was barely a teen when The Linda Lindas formed, but turns 22 next month. The youngest member, Mila De la Garza, just had her sixteenth.

Some of the band’s feet-first evolution might also be chalked up to their departure from the iconic punk label Epitaph. The Hollywood-based independent institution was a logical fit for their first two full lengths, “Growing Up” (2022) and “No Obligation” (2024), but “Gotta Get Out” is being released through Reprise – a Warner imprint, one of the Big Three – which could potentially raise the eyebrows of punk and DIY scenesters.

“We are always so grateful for the people there and the support there, which still stands now, and we feel it,” guitarist Lucia De la Garza says of Epitaph. The band wrote the record without a deal and in between contracts. “We knew that we wanted to make an album, and that’s kind of all we knew at that point. Once we had written and recorded a lot of music that we were very proud of, in the end, it was like, this is it. This is the album we’ve made that we’re most proud of, and we’re just gonna try to push it and see how far it can go. It felt like everybody at Warner was really on our team and really responded to the music as well.”

DIY ethics informed the album’s art direction, as well. Eloise handmade everything, cutting the single and album visuals out of craft paper and walking into Warner to present her work. It’s a delightful image: this multibillion-dollar conglomerate moving to the whims of young people who make art in their bedrooms.

Even with sound intentions of getting their anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-fascist mandate in front of more people than ever, I expected to hear some airbrushing on 2Gotta Get Out”. And while some of the OG pop-punk-indebted songs here do maybe have a bit less of a bite, the label certainly didn’t meddle, tamper, or parachute in Jack Antonoff… or whatever.

The Linda Lindas’ roll call of famous friends is almost buries the lede. It is so well documented that it sometimes threatens to eclipse their actual work. It’s the only thing more widely documented than how they first came onto people’s radars: a viral pandemic moment of them sneering through a white-knuckle microsong called “Racist Sexist Boy” in the incongruous setting of the LA Public Library.

The video seemingly landed on the for-you pages of people like Thurston Moore and Tom Morello, who quickly began spreading the world. The latter has since invited them to play his activism all-dayer, Power to the People, alongside Springsteen, Joan Baez, and other outspoken anti-fascist musicians.

But The Linda Lindas had been a band for three years at that point and already mixed in circles with riot grrrl foremother Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, who’d seen them at LA’s women-curated festival Gxrlschool, alongside Karen O. After the library performance, the release of their 2022 debut, and their performance in Amy Poehler’s Moxie film, they would go on to add a stadium tour with Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins to their CV. (“Billy Corgan rode by on a golf cart. He waved at us,” Eloise Wong remembers.)

They’ve played with almost every other indie rock and punk-adjacent legend you can think of since then: Rancid, Paramore, Blondie, The Breeders. They even got Weird Al playing accordion on a track from their last album. And just this month the new Green Day film, Nimrods, gives them a shout out. “It happened to The Linda Lindas; it could happen to us!”

Peter Gabriel is releasing a new album, “o/i,” later this year via Real World (the exact release date is TBA). Now he has shared its latest single, “Looking for the Happy.” Similar to his 2023 album, i/o, each single from the album will be released on days with full moons and there will be “Bright-Side” and “Dark-Side” mixes for each song on the album. This is the “Bright-Side Mix” of “Looking for the Happy.” Listen below, followed by a behind-the-scenes video about the song.

Gabriel had this to say about the song in a press release: “I’ve always found it so much easier to write sad songs than happy ones and I thought, right, I’m going to challenge myself here. I wanted to base it on a groove that made dancing irresistible, it felt like it was unleashing some joy. Although this is about the search for happiness, it had to have a chorus feeling like a celebration.

“If you can find what in today, in the now, is making you happy and what you’re grateful for, I think it’s a much better ride—a better vehicle to travel in—and as I get older, I’m trying to do a little less bitching.

“In the song I’m talking about trying to communicate with animals or connecting with nature, or sitting under the old oak tree with a cup of tea and appreciating that. The simple things—opening up to what’s good, while we’re busy complaining about what’s bad.

“Trying to get a handle on where you fit in life, that’s part of what I write about a lot. Also getting comfortable with two contradictory ideas simultaneously has been part of growing old—like being a part of everything and a part of nothing.”

“This was one of those songs that began with a groove, originally a groove with a Latin flavour. The groove is always so important to me, if I don’t feel it in my body, then everything is a whole lot harder. There are obviously songs I write which are not groove based, but this is one where it clearly helped shape the song. I’m always happy once the groove is kicking, it suggests where to go and makes it easy to play through and explore different ideas. Then I can take one look around the studio at any time and see happy faces everywhere and I think—this is why I play music.”

As with i/o,for each single from the album, Gabriel will be working with a different artist to do the cover artwork. The artwork for “Looking for the Happy” is “Closed Circuit II” by Tishan Hsu.

Gabriel further explains: “I’ve only recently come across Tishan Hsu’s work and I was blown away. I thought it had a childlike simplicity in one sense, like Miro or Paul Klee, but it has all these technological references.

“In the way that the song was trying to explore consciousness, technology and nature I think Tishan does that in some of his own work. Although the work is about tech it’s interesting that the work itself is not really technology-based—it is very traditional painting and sculptural techniques that he’s employing.

“I started looking at a work from 1986 which is called Closed Circuit II, and although it has been compared to the original Instagram logo it was created a long time before that. It’s simple and it has face references but it’s blank and full of feeling at the same time. I think it’s a great, great image and I’m very happy Tishan is letting us use it.

“Often when we see these images for the songs, we’re reacting spontaneously to something that feels right and then we dig down and discover that there are similar themes being explored visually and musically. In this case, it was apparently the exploration of technology nature and humanity. It’s great when you find that something that intuitively felt right also has all these other connections that help to make the music and the art feel part of the same whole. In a way, you’re all trying to peel the orange and open up the same fruit.”

The new album was recorded at Real World Studios, Bath and The Beehive in London. Tchad Blake and Mark ‘Spike’ Stent will be mixing all the songs, taking on the Dark-Side and Bright-Side

Previously Gabriel shared the album’s first single, “Been Undone,” the “Dark-Side” mix of the song. Then he shared its second single, “Put the Bucket Down,” Then he shared its third single, “What Lies Ahead.” Then he shared its fourth single, “Till Your Mind is Shining,”  “A Hard Lesson” was the album’s next single. “I Belong to the Sky” was another single from the album . “Won’t Stand Down” and “One by One” were other singles from the album.

I/o was his first album of original songs in over 20 years. Prior to i/o, Gabriel’s last full-length album of original materials was 2002’s “Up”, although in 2010 he released the “Scratch My Back” covers album and in 2011 he released “New Blood“, which featured orchestral re-recordings of songs from across Gabriel’s career.