A Musical Opinion I've Turned Back On: Tom Waits

"Tom Waits has several great albums."

No...he is an inconsistent artist capable of great highs on a song-by-song basis. In the past fifteen years or so, he's seemed to write about five of every song and releases all of them. For every "Take It With Me" there are three to four songs like it, most of them on "Orphans," that I surprise me when they pop up on shuffle because I don't remember them at all but they sound just like some other song of his that I like more. That, or they sound like three other songs I kind of remember also being somewhere but I'm not sure where and I don't want to go finding out.

If he or Kathleen Brennan are actually choosing the best songs for the albums, I shudder to think how much more of the same stuff is out there. Listening to his records, you get numbed by the Tom Waits Melody Zone where nothing moves too much, nothing surprises too much, and you get the vague sense this is the same as the last one but God, let's not go back and make sure.