Tom Waits has announced a covers compilation of his music, which will include the likes of Solomon Burke, Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Marianne Faithfull, Bob Seger, Diana Krall, John Hammond, and many others.
The musician made the announcement via social media, uploading the album art for “Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow”, with a promise that the project is set for release on May 29th.
“With his long-time creative partner and wife Kathleen Brennan, [Waits] has dismantled and reassembled the idea of song itself, crafting works that exist as both raw expression and high art.”
Few artists have remapped the terrain of popular music, and culture at large, like Tom Waits. Over the course of five decades, he has forged a singular aesthetic that defies genre and turns the marginal into myth. His work is neither fully inside nor outside the mainstream tradition but moves restlessly between them, drawing from vaudeville, blues, jazz, folk, theatre – and just about anything else that catches his ear – to craft something wholly his own. With his long-time creative partner and wife Kathleen Brennan, he has dismantled and reassembled the idea of song itself, crafting works that exist as both raw expression and high art. This collection honours not only the extraordinary versatility of Waits and Brennan’s song writing, but the importance of an artist who continues to haunt and inspire from the edges inward.
Waits and collaborator and wife Kathleen Brennan have ordered the covers chronologically. The album, therefore, opens with Bruce Springsteen’s live recording of ‘Jersey Girl’, Waits’ ode to Brennan from the 1980’s album “Heartattack And Vine”.
18 songs later, the compilation promises to end gracefully with Joan Baez’s version of ‘Day After Tomorrow’ from 2004’s “Real Gone“. The album will also come with extensive sleeve notes featuring a track-by-track commentary, digging into the particularities of each recording.
The team behind the upcoming release have shared that the “collection honours not only the extraordinary versatility of Waits and Brennan’s songwriting, but the importance of an artist who continues to haunt and inspire from the edges inward.”
out May 29th on Ace Records.
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