Alice

Tom Waits | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (May 7, 2002)
• Original Release Date: 2002
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Anti
• ASIN: B00005YX3L
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Music
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (94 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,932 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #2 in Music > Indie Music > Pop > Singer-Songwriters

Track Listings

1. Alice

2. Everything You Can Think

3. Flowers Grave

4. No One Knows I'm Gone

5. Kommienezuepadt

6. Poor Edward

7. Table Top Joe

8. Lost In The Harbor

9. We're All Mad Here

10. Watch Her Disappear

11. Reeperbahn

12. I'm Still Here

13. Fish & Bird

14. Barcarolle

15. Fawn

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

The grizzled modern persona of Tom Waits finds new life on Alice, a slow, grave record that explores physical and moral decay with the same harrowing insight of 1992's Bone Machine. Originally written as an opera with his longtime songwriting partner, playwright Kathleen Brennan, the songs on Alice were performed live in a Hamburg theater for 18 months in 1992 and 1993, but were never committed to tape (officially, at least). This studio recording retains a sense of narrative cohesion, giving Waits a set of tormented and bizarre characters that go well with the motley crew he's assembled over the years. It is, in fact, the most consistent record of Waits's career, offering not only a stable train of thought, but a musical approach that, while featuring the same vaudevillian touches that have characterized his work since Swordfishtrombones, finds a voice all its own. Without much percussion to back them up, violins, cellos, and horns dominate the record, bathing Waits's familiar growl in a sly, slow cacophony that sounds like an underwater fugue, the notes like rust on the strings. "Watch Her Disappear," with its sparse, sad pump organ, and the twisted torch song "Reeperbahn" have the smoky café mystery of Edith Piaf by way of Leonard Cohen, recovered from the water-logged tapes in Cole Porter's long-lost dingy. It's a burst of dark, world-weary poetry for lonely Saturday nights, cloudy days on the beach, or long strolls through graveyards. --Matthew Cooke

Product Description

Alice has been called Wait's long-lost masterpiece. Originally performed as an opera directed by Robert Wilson for Hamburg's Thalia Theatre in 1992, but left unrecorded until 2001. The show ran for a year and a half using an unusual orchestra designed by Waits to underpin the songs co-written with his wife Kathleen Brennen. Rather than being directly based on Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, the Waits-Brennen Alice takes inspiration from feelings remembered and dreams recalled after reading the books. Released simultaneously with Blood Money.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning CD November 2, 2003

By Robert C. Hamilton

Format:Audio CD

Forbidden love is one of the perennial themes of mankind; when a genius like Tom Waits tackles this theme, the results--as here--can be awesome.

The album is based loosely around the life and work of Charles Dodgson, known to the world as Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice in Wonderland books. The songs mostly comment on his famous obsession with a neighbor girl named Alice, for whom he wrote the beloved books. However, this album is not, as some critics maintain, about "intergenerational relationships", but more about hopeless love in general.

The album's tone is that of a sinister fairy-tale for grownups. It begins with the brilliantly sultry title song, which sets forth the subject and obsession of the entire work. The next track, "Everything you can Think," paints a vivid and surrealist picture of a horrifying sort of wonderland--"Everything you can think of is true / the dish ran away with the spoon / look deep in your heart for the little, red glow / we're decomposing as we go."

As many critics have pointed out, Alice is more weighted toward soft, slow ballads than the average Waits album. This is true; musically it is more accessible than, say, Bone Machine. But there is enough other material to make the CD feel balanced. "Kommienezeupadt", though many object to its presence on this disc, is actually a nice contrast to the other material and is an enjoyably insane track. "Table-Top Joe" is a very fun song, and reveals the amazing versatility of Tom Waits' voice.

But the real strength comes in the heartbreaking ballads. It is impossible to choose a favorite song on here, since there really are no weak links. Newcomers to this music might find Waits an unlikely balladeer, but the "die-hard" fans who consistently describe his voice as "beautiful" are not making things up--I think if you listen to the sort of incredible pathos and experience his voice has accrued over the years, and the way he uses it to communicate so directly to the deepest human emotions, you will agree that comments about his "growliness" become irrelevant. His voice is a remarkable instrument, and he knows exactly how to use it. If this album were sung by someone with perfect technique and melliifluous tone, I think it would lose most of its impact.

The first time I listened to Alice all the way through, my first thought was of the classical definition of tragedy: an art form that causes catharsis by producing pity and fear in the observer. As we listen to this work, we feel great pity for the character(s) Waits portrays as situations become increasingly hopeless, but by the last two songs, a true state of emotional rest has been reached. For me, Alice is the most remarkable work to have yet issued from the popular music world.

61 of 67 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Elusiveness? Tom has it nailed. May 28, 2002

By Royce E. Buehler VINE™ VOICE

Format:Audio CD

In the third chapter of "Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There," Alice strays into a forgetful forest, in which everything loses its name. There she meets a fawn, and they wander companionably until they come to a clearing, whereupon the Fawn remembers what fawns and human girls are, and it bounds away in fear. Carroll was obsessed and desolated by the innocence lost with childhood, and here, just for a moment, his creation Alice mirrors his desolation, disclosing an even more irretrievable innocence lost before childhood.

"Alice," Tom Wait's cycle of theater songs from 1992, about the time he was producing "Bone Machine," captures that desolation and bottles it in a ghostly, smoky glass. The album offers, in the same package, what are probably Waits's most emotionally accessible music, and most intellectually inaccessible lyrics. (The latter may be partly because the songs were written for multiple characters in an opera, and it's hard to disentangle them when they're all rendered by one singer. That's why I feel unable, yet, to go from four and a half to five stars: Unlike most of his best material, these songs don't sound designed for Tom's voice.)

I know this album will be getting more play from me than its companion release, Blood Money. The pleasures of the latter all lie on its surface. Its point of view is monochrome, uniformly cynical, and easily fathomed (appropriately enough, since that matches the worldview of Woyzeck - each of these two song cycles serves its own theater piece well), while "Alice" is nacreous, balancing the tenderness and reality of Carroll's unachievable love with the ominous sense of mortality and defilement that haunt it. That album is grand posturing by a gleefully evil minded carnival barker; this one is authentic exploration, both of the deep currents in Lewis Carroll's two masterpieces, and of the human condition.

One possible reading of the plot would run this way.

"Alice" sets the metascene, the relationship between the teller and the beloved told-to. "Everything You Can Think" sets the scene, via a railway carriage ride (shades of Sylvie and Bruno!) into Looking-Glass land. Then come two arias sung looking back from Alice's old age. First Alice (who is a flower, specifically a lily) sings a lament that "no one puts flowers on a flower's grave." Carroll, already engraved ("the moon is full here every night"), sings an answering lament and plea - and warning ("Live me golden tell me dark/Hide from Graveyard John").

The flashforward ends. A sudden, blitzkrieg uptempo slams us into a nightmarish Dreamland: "Kommienezuspadt" is the manic white rabbit's advice, half in German, half in gibberish, to be on time. "Sei punktlich" - be punctual - he howls, with all the insistence of Prussian clockwork. We meet several more denizens of this crazed underworld in the next four numbers. The Caterpillar from his shroomtop croons the Armstrong ballad "Table Top Joe"; the Mad Hatter and March Hare ("We're All Mad Here") do a creditable impersonation of those Graveyard Johns that Alice should have been hiding from.

We get images of Alice's grown-up sexuality , light ("Watch Her Disappear") and dark ("Reeperbahn"). Then two Platonic, cosmically lonesome ballads, from Alice again ("I'm Still Here"), and from a sympathetic sailor in a bar.

In "Barcarolle", things get more nameless than ever. Alice becomes both "you" and "she"; Carroll becomes both "you" and "a man she kissed on a train." Are we dealing with Carroll's obsession now, or Waits', or the listener's? And no sooner has the singer declared to Alice "I belong to you", than she breaks away, suddenly restored to awareness and fear, and leaves him forever desolate at the edge of the forest clearing (the final instrumental "Fawn".)

Well anyway, that's my take. But as Mac the Knife once said, "Anders geht es auch."

39 of 44 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Mad Hatter Strikes Again May 15, 2002

By Mark Begley

Format:Audio CD

Any time I play a post-'80s Tom Waits album for an unintiated listener, they almost always state: "This sounds like Disney music." Disney music sung by a bedraggled quarryman, I say. So it only seems fitting that Waits would end up writing the music and libretto for a production of the story behind Alice in Wonderland. The songs, mostly ballads, have that '40s-'50s Disney-score feel ("We're all mad here," is one example), coupled with the utterly desperate, and somewhat depraved lyrics, that pointedly convey Carroll's obsession with his young neighbor. "Everything you think," and "No one knows I'm gone," are heart-rending without swimming in bathos (or pathos). "Kommienezuepadt," is one of the few wild rides on the album (see Blood Money, Waits' other recent release for more wildness). As with Blood Money, and also Black Rider and Frank's Wild Years, Waits' writing seems more focused than on other albums, with Alice being possibly the most "complete" work he has ever created. It's certainly the most poetic. For those fans who tuned out when Waits switched from jazzy bar tunes to wild musical experimentation, this will be a welcome regression back to those times. Although not necessarily jazz or blues, the songs here are slow-tempoed, with sparse instrumentation. For those fans who like all of Waits' work, or just the "later" stuff, will also be pleased. It is in fact a perfect combination, along with the equally brilliant Blood Money, of Waits' musical styles, as well as the pinnacle of his oeuvre to date. It is amazing to see how Waits continues to produce such stunning work after more than 30 years of performing. Here's to many, many more!