Words by Jacob Henneman//Illustration by Ryan Flynn
There is more than one Tom Waits. You can get grizzled, smoky voiced men sitting under cocked wool caps in coal mining towns drenched in soot. You could find one sitting in the corner of the pub pounding boilermakers. He is every man who has been around the block, seen his fair share of things, always with a good
story or joke to tell. The only difference setting him apart from John Q. Everyman is his trade: Tom Waits’ tools are his guitar, and mainly his voice.

This brings us to Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, a Cerberus of discs each with a distinct mind of its own. The first disc, “Brawlers” is a fist clenching knuckle sandwich that will make you check your front teeth after it’s over just to make sure they are still in tact. Dragging roots blues riffs as well as that weathered voice across the gravel, the first disc is scraped,
bruised and battered, staggering to its feet after a rough night.

“Bawlers” is filled with sweeping “Ol’ 55” balladry. After “Brawlers” kicked your ass, Waits introduces this disc to mend your wounds. He does so with charming piano and gentle strumming and percussion, with the occasional touch of horns or strings to give it that smoky lounge feel. It doesn’t hurt my
manhood to say that I’m partial to the songs on the second disc, either. As cozy as these songs already are, some of them are infused with added atmosphere. They are songs of the times they were born. As said by Waits, “Some were written in turmoil and recorded at night in moving cars.” Although that might compromise the quality of the tracks, I doubt the songs would have been as good had they waited to get all proper in the studio.

The third disc, “Bastards,” is Waits as another one of his roles: the trickster. Here, he’s the guy who won’t necessarily beat you up for your lunch money, but con you into coughing it up, and then go tell the whole school how he yanked your chain. It is filled with a hodgepodge of styles and worldly spoken word stories and longwinded jokes. You get the feeling that Waits has been around
the block a few more times than the average man, gathering culture and collecting stories to store in the deep, dusty, corners of his memory next to the spider, smoking a pipe to let them out on an otherwise slow night.

Orphans is a multidimensional piece that is as much an autobiography of Waits’ life and more than three decades as a singer, actor, and composer. As with any album chronicling such a vast amount of the scrapings together of work, there
are some throwaway tracks here and there. Overall, though, you really appreciate the work that has been done to scavenge these tracks from the depths of wherever the hell they were wasting away at before. Not only will Orphans be appealing to Waits fans, but it is a good jumping off point for the next generation as well. You can choose your favorite disc and wear it out, but all
three represent Waits as being more than just an artist recording in a studio behind panes of glass and giant mixing boards, he is a man who writes songs because they are what everyone experiences. Orphans is a testament to his longevity and is both a retrospective of his career and a big step forward.