Untold Storyteller's Secret
Though Mr. Waits's recordings of their compositions are often dressed with unorthodox arrangements that blend elements of Weimar cabaret, Mexican folk, industrial rock, postbop and R&B, the songs can be stripped down to their essentials. Over a cup of hot tea, he reminds his visitor he was a solo performer for a long while.
Gleefully mixing metaphors, he said of an emerging song: "I have to be willing to look at it like a three-legged table. If you've got three legs, you know it can stand up. Then we can put stripes on its tie or give it a toupee, but you need to have something to hang it on." He added: "I'm usually more about the nucleus of it all."
The arrangements are fleshed out in the studio: "I don't go in with a blueprint like I'm building a box," he said. On "Bad as Me," Mr. Waits is surrounded by an extraordinary cast, including Les Claypool, Flea, Charlie Musselwhite, Patrick Warren and the songwriters' son Casey Waits on drums. The guitarists include David Hidalgo, Keith Richards and Marc Ribot. They all get plenty of room to move.
"Sometimes you tell a musician 'I want to hear what comes to you.' You don't even tell them what you want them to play." On "Get Lost," Mr. Waits said, "David played a riff that sounds like a Ray Charles Wurlitzer. But he didn't play it again." Ms. Brennan found it on the recording of an earlier take. "She said, 'This is the foundation.'"
The arrangement of "Chicago," the album's opener, is built on a banjo figure by Mr. Waits. "I made it sound like an old-time train bell. That stayed in. We built on it. We started a groove."
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