Alice - Tom Waits

Rating: 6.5/10
Sound Quality: 320 kb/s
Format: Mp3
Record Label: Anti
Year Released: 2002
Album Covers: Included
Pass: radiodada
Links: rapidshare

About the Album

Alice is an album by Tom Waits, released in 2002 on Epitaph Records (under the Anti sub-label). The album contains the majority of songs written for the play Alice, based on the story Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The adaptation was directed by Robert Wilson, whom Waits had previously worked with on the play The Black Rider, and originally set up at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1992. The play has since been done on various theatres around the world.

The songs had been unofficially released on a bootleg called The Alice Demos many years before this official release. The source of the bootleg release is supposed to be from studio recordings made for the cast of the play, and was taken when Waits' car was broken into in late 1992 (as confirmed by Waits in interviews). Several different versions of the bootleg album were in circulation before the release of the official version. This album was co-released with another Waits album, Blood Money, containing songs from a play adapted by Robert Wilson from Georg Büchner's Woyzeck. In 2002 this album was ranked #1 in Metacritic's Top 30 albums of the year. The Edward of "Poor Edward" is Edward Mordrake.

About Tom Waits

Thomas Alan Waits (born 7 December 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car." With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music, Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona. He has worked as a composer for movies and musical plays and as a supporting actor in films, including The Fisher King, Coffee & Cigarettes, Down by Law, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Wristcutters: A Love Story, and Short Cuts. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his soundtrack work on One from the Heart.

Lyrically, Waits' songs contain atmospheric portrayals of bizarre, seedy characters and places, although he has also shown a penchant for more conventional ballads. He has a cult following and has influenced subsequent songwriters despite having little radio or music video support. His songs are best-known to the general public in the form of cover versions by more visible artists—for example, "Jersey Girl," performed by Bruce Springsteen; "Downtown Train" and "Tom Traubert's Blues" performed by Rod Stewart; and "Ol' '55," performed by the Eagles. Although Waits' albums have met with mixed commercial success in his native United States, they have occasionally achieved gold album sales status in other countries. He has been nominated for a number of major music awards and has won Grammy Awards for two albums, Bone Machine and Mule Variations.

Waits currently lives in Sonoma County, California with his wife and their three children.