Bad as Me is the seventeenth studio album by American rock musician Tom Waits, released on 2011 October 21 by ANTI- Records. Upon its release, Bad as Me received widespread critical acclaim. It is Waits' first album since 2004's Real Gone to consist completely of new material. All songs on Bad as Me are written and composed by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Read more on Last.fm.
Tom Waits (born Thomas Alan Waits, in Pomona, California, on December 7, 1949) is a prolific American singer, songwriter, composer, and actor.
He started his career in the early 1970s as a singer in spit 'n' sawdust bars. Initially, he was deeply influenced by the beat generation, novelists like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, and poets like Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski. Waits is often compared to Charles Bukowski, being similar both in content and lifestyle Read more on Last.fm
On this latest entry from the most soulful carnival barker left on earth, everything that rises, as it does, converges. And when this occurs, you can taste the whiskey, inhale the second hand smoke and hear the aching heart beat of bygone travelers beating in shallow graves.
Tom Waits is Biblical, a kind of maniacal Kerouac character you meet in a low lit bar with sawdust floors. He always has a collection of yarns to impart, some of them with a distinct purpose and others detached meditations on the misery of America. The bottom line in terms of Bad As Me is its a rich, bloody tapestry of broken soul with a distinct, quasi-reliable narrator. It’s the best kind of Waits record, where soul and sound collide in a parable of Old Testament proportions. You can feel the blood.
5 stars.
It’s humbling to think that a guy like this should, by all archetypal models, be putting out stuff like Lulu, and just put out not only one of the best entries into his own discography, but also one of the best records of the year, period. He’s taken everything that makes him great, tightened the screws on his traveling circus, and blazed a trail right into our faces until the wheels fall off. He’s a troubadour, a balladeer, a savage, a salesman, a poet, a pirate, a sinner, a solider, and a saint, all in under an hour. Bad is weird, wild, willful, wonky, whimsical, wry, warm. Everything that’s great, and nothing that isn’t. Pure 190-proof Waits. Very likely my AOTY in an overwhelming year of endlessly great music.