With undeniable cultural gravity, the team of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan join luminaries such as Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Randy Newman, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Leonard Cohen, Lee Hazlewood, Brian Wilson and Laura Nyro in Ace Records long-running series of multi-artist compilations celebrating the great American songwriters of the modern era. Hundreds of artists from all walks of music have recorded songs from Waits and Brennans matchless catalogue, 19 of the finest of which comprise this hand-picked selection, including many chosen by the songwriters themselves.
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. His influence reverberates not just through the underground and avant-garde, but across theatre, film, literature, and visual art. 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 Brennans songwriting, but the importance of an artist who continues to haunt and inspire from the edges inward.
Aces selection is sequenced chronologically by song, opening with Bruce Springsteens live recording of Jersey Girl, Waits ode to Brennan from 1980s Heartattack And Vine, and closing with folk matriarch Joan Baezs version of Waits and Brennans anti-war Day After Tomorrow from Waits more recent Real Gone. All the great things that came out of New Jersey dont hold a candle to Kathleen Brennan, at least not in Toms eyes, Bob Dylan said on his Theme Time Radio Hour show. She rescued me, reflected Waits in an interview for The Guardian. Maybe I rescued her too, thats often how it works. Upshot is that we both got into the same leaky boat. Everybody knows shes the brains behind Pa, as Dylan might have said. Im just the figurehead. Shes the one whos steering the ship.
In addition to steering the ship, Brennan became Waits songwriting partner. The couples first-released joint composition, Hang Down Your Head from Rain Dogs, is heard here in a raunchy rendition by country-blues heroine Lucinda Williams. Elsewhere, performers from the worlds of jazz, blues, gospel, soul and rock put their own stamps on great songs with which Waits devotees will be familiar on Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, Franks Wild Years, Big Time, Bone Machine, Mule Variations, Real Gone and Orphans. Pride of place because its a particular favourite of Waits and proved incredibly challenging to license goes to the heart-wrenching recording of Down There By The Train from Johnny Cashs late-life masterpiece American Recordings.
Made with the blessing, approval and involvement of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, Where The Willow And The Dogwood Grow is an essential collection for any fan of this remarkable artists unique work.