Blood Money
Songs for Wilson's Woyzeck, with a calliope.
Tom Waits, 2002
- Released
- May 2002
- Label
- Anti-
- Producer
- Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan
The songs were written by Waits and Brennan for Robert Wilson's staging of Georg Buchner's play Woyzeck, which opened at the Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen in November 2000. They were released at the same time as Alice in 2002. Waits joked that people get upset when you have not had a record out in seven years and then get upset when you put out two at once: first they ask where their eggs are, then they say they did not order this.
The sound is built around a 57-whistle pneumatic calliope. Shiny Things was in the play but not on this record, and appeared on Orphans in 2006. Knife Chase features his son Casey on drums. Christgau judged it a more consistent record than Alice. God's Away on Business was used in the film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room in 2005. By 2003 the album had sold 143,000 copies in the US.
Personnel
- Tom Waits vocals, piano, calliope, Chamberlin, guitars, toy piano, pump organ
- Larry Taylor bass, guitar
- Bebe Risenfors bass clarinet, accordion, saxophone, clarinet
- Gino Robair marimba, bells, gongs, bongos, timpani, floor toms
- Colin Stetson saxophones, clarinet, bass clarinet
- Matt Brubeck cello, bass
- Stewart Copeland drum set and log drums on track 5
- Charlie Musselwhite harmonica on tracks 5 and 9
- Casey Waits drums on track 7
- Dawn Harms Stroh violin, violin
More from Tom Waits
Closing Time (1973), The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), Nighthawks at the Diner (1975), Small Change (1976), Foreign Affairs (1977), Blue Valentine (1978), Heartattack and Vine (1980), Swordfishtrombones (1983), Rain Dogs (1985), Franks Wild Years (1987), Bone Machine (1992), The Black Rider (1993), Mule Variations (1999), Alice (2002), Real Gone (2004), Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006), Bad as Me (2011)
Sources
- Blood Money (Tom Waits album), Wikipedia
- Tom Waits, Wikipedia