A musician releasing a box set is like an invitation to appraise his career, a call for preemptive obituaries and legacy judgments. But for Tom Waits, this is old news, having long ago earned the status of perennially lauded/critically invulnerable artists alongside Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. At this point, the only thing left open to debate is, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, Tom Waits: a great songwriter, or the greatest songwriter?
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards may seem like an unusual set upon which to make such a facetious judgment, given that the set is promoted as a collection of outtakes, leftovers, and rarities. But that's not quite true; for an artist like Waits, who has built his reputation on consistency and durability, it's somewhat appropriate to assess his value on the basis of his deep cuts. What's more, Orphans isn't really a career-spanning outtake collection at all, what with Tom going George Lucas on the proceedings and splicing in new songs and re-recordings. The end product, neatly compartmentalized into three style-segregated discs, is about as perfect a summary of Waits' appeal as can be found on the open market, a shadow greatest hits that offers testimony to his unique and diverse talents without recycling any of his album material.
Looking at Waits' career from a distance reveals a number of contradictions: gravel-raw hobo-rock alternating with tender jazz-crooner torch songs, one foot in blues-roots traditionalism and one ear to modern sounds (cf. the turntables and beatboxing on 2005's Real Gone), inhabiting various fictional personae or pouring out his heart like a bottle. So it makes sense to trisect his style, creating a disc for each faction of Waits' diverse audience: Brawlers for the dudes who dress and groom like Waits' stage character, Bawlers for the SUV drivers who found Waits by way of Rod Stewart, and Bastards for the people who thought the singer's high water mark was his role in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula.
Brawlers presents probably the best-known of Tom Waits' personalities, filled as it is with vocal cord damage, found percussion, old-timey arrangements, and cartoon-buzz lead guitar. It's also the disc that flirts most dangerously with cliché, filled as it is with his well-trod inventory of Americana underbelly images: trains, jailhouses, barrooms, etc. However, the secret of Waits' act is how well he deploys these should-be-tired cultural touchstones; at the very least, he sounds more comfortable in the role of a boxcar-hopper than he does reciting the ripped-from-the-headlines Middle East folk song "Road to Peace". Certainly it helps that he continues to buck the aging rocker career trend of increasing cleanliness, wrapping these songs in dirt-grit production that keeps the Big Bopper warble of "Lie to Me" or the garage 12-bar Ramones cover "The Return of Jackie and Judy" from sounding like a House of Blues exhibit.
The tone of Bawlers, on the surface, is every bit as soothing as Brawlers is abrasive. But for all the gentle piano and brass embellishments, the mood is far from serene, inhabiting the bittersweet, sentimental borderline between a bender and hangover. Given that this sound goes back to Waits' earliest days, the timeframe is wider here than elsewhere in the set, yet it holds together with a late-night woozy consistency while veering from AM-radio jazz ("You Can Never Hold Back Spring") to folk ("Widow's Grove"), and intimate ("World Keeps Turning") to show-stoppingly anthemic ("Never Let Go", "Down There By the Train"). More than any other disc, Bawlers is proof that Waits can pull these kind of nightclub-act songs out of his derby hat at will, able to channel the archetypal piano-man character with minimal effort.
All the more impressive then that he's made the effort to sabotage that typecasting, as exemplified by the set's most fascinating disc, Bastards. Collecting all the odd items that don't fall into a simple quiet-loud dichotomy, Bastards reveals Waits at his most theatrical, filled with weird spoken-word monologues, gypsy-opera arrangements, a capella experiments, and demented covers. Few people can make music that's authentically frightening without crossing the line into campy silliness, yet this is another skill Waits can lay claim to; look no further than the Disney nightmare of his "Heigh Ho" or the ghoulish nature documentary of "Army Ants". There may be nothing else on these three discs as striking as "Dog Door", his collaboration with Sparklehorse that traps Waits' repertoire of voices in a funhouse of synths and tape loops, a thrilling (and teasingly rare) modern take on his familiar formula.
But you can't really fault Waits for only dipping an occasional toe into modern sounds, as his career has been built on being a living repository of 20th century American music and culture, while turning the neat trick of engaging that history rather than curating it. Orphans, most notably, is smoking-gun evidence of Waits' remarkable longevity, as it's hard to think of many other artists that could place new material adjacent to old without the result sounding disjointed or wildly disparate in quality. It's enough to add another layer of invulnerability to the already untouchable critical status of Tom Waits, an unlikely benefit coming from a cleaning-house box set.
