The Tom Waits fanbase is not entirely starved for news lately, but most of it is about Waits’s acting career. On the music side, the news is small change: something about singing on a new Pogues tribute, and similar tidbits.
Then came the announcement of Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow, a star-studded tribute to the music of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. OK, it’s not new original music (we’ve waited 15 years for a new Waits album) but whatever it is, we’ll take it!
The excitement gives way, on closer inspection, to disappointment: there’s nothing actually new in this new release. (“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away,” to borrow a classic Waits-as-huckster phrase.)
Each cover has been available for years–in many cases, for three or four decades. So this is material we have heard before, and written about before–see our 2023 feature The 50 Best Tom Waits Covers Ever. The most recent of the tracks on hand is “Hold On” by Madison Cunningham, but even that one dates back six years. It’s a killer version, by the way, a clear highlight of this compilation.
Still, having these covers compiled in one place serves a purpose, if only to help reassess the song catalog. And realistically, the number of Waits devotees who have actually listened to all these songs is miniscule; they could fit in a single booth at an all-night diner. If a song is new to you, then it’s new music, regardless of its original release date.
The very title of the album suggests a new framing, a fresh lens: the notion that Waits’s song-writing changed when he partnered with Brennan, and their extensive and lengthy collaboration deserves its own celebration.
The album opens with Bruce Springsteen in concert in 1981 at Meadowlands in New Jersey. The location matters, because the song is “Jersey Girl.” Waits had released it the previous year, but Springsteen quickly came to own it. He cleans up the unsanitized language that Waits used; he sings his own lines here and there, which you get to do when you are the Boss. He gets help from a stadium full of Jersey girls and boys who cheer raucously on that triumphant line “Down the shore everything’s all right.”
With this opener the album breaks its own rules: “Jersey Girl” is not a Waits/Brennan composition, it was written by Waits alone. But the song is about Kathleen Brennan, who was living in New Jersey at the time they met. For all its rhapsodic “sha-la-la”-ing, the lyric correctly predicts they’d eventually marry.
From there the album runs chronologically through the couple’s songbook. We get two or three selections from each of the studio albums they released to date, from the magnificent ’80s trifecta–Swordfishtrombones (‘83), Rain Dogs (‘85), and Frank’s Wild Years (‘87)–through to Real Gone (2004). Except that Bone Machine is represented by only one track, The Ramones tearing through “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up.” For some reason, Bad as Me (2011) gets overlooked entirely–another disappointment. Also getting a pass are the collaborations with Robert Wilson, the avant-garde director (so, no songs from Black Rider, Blood Money, or Alice). Treating that material separate from the rest seems like a good call.
The inclusion of Waits/Brennan songs written for other artists (or recorded first by them) invigorates the mid-section of the album. Three songs are in this “orphans” category: one is Marianne Faithful on “Strange Weather,” the title track to her 1987 album. Produced by the mercurial Hal Willner and featuring eclectic guitarist Robert Quine, it provides the most artful four minutes of music on the compilation. “Diamond in Your Mind” (2002) was written for Solomon Burke, who pours his considerable soul into the piece. Finally, Waits/Brennan wrote “Down There by the Train” for Johnny Cash, who rightly takes it as a spiritual, an “outlaw hymn” as Cash called it. These latter two songs were later recorded by Waits himself and surfaced on the three-disc Orphans release in 2006, where they got a bit lost in the shuffle.
Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow seems well-balanced, too, in its stylistic distribution. Gut-bucket blues, tangos and other Afro-Caribbean rhythms, spoken-word pieces, gospel hymns, nursery rhymes, and sappy love ballads–Waits/Brennan explored all those modes and more. In Waits’s opinion, his songs divide into “Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards,” and all are present here in strong doses. Norah Jones on “The Long Way Home” and Lucinda Williams’s “Hang Down Your Head” had me bawling so hard I had to put the needle back on “Gin-Soaked Boy” by Southside Johnny to get my brawl back on. For the Latin tinge that Waits embraced in the ’80s, Diana Krall slays on “Temptation,” aided by a slick band not afraid to get nasty. For the spoken-word element, how about “Jockey Full Of Bourbon” as performed by Los Lobos, complete with age-old nursery rhyme chorus.
If there’s something imbalanced about compilation, it’s that the roster skews geriatric. A few Gen X, Y, and Z artists would have added spark, and testified to Waits/Brennan’s continued relevance. Part of the issue is simple nepotism, with several of the artists being old friends of the family. David Hidalgo (Los Lobos) played on a number of Tom Waits albums. John Hammond and Southside Johnny both issued full-length Waits tribute albums in the past, with Waits becoming personally involved with both. And now here they are on the new tribute. Fair enough, I guess, but it does come at the expense of emerging artists (or anyone under the age of 50).
Maturity is great, but so is vitality. Springsteen brings it on “Jersey Girl” (he was 31 at the time), as does Madison Cunningham on “Hold On” (she is still in her twenties). For my money, hers is the album’s strongest track. Norah Jones in her dignified manner has a youthful vibrancy. But most of the other artists were well past their prime. There’s a reason Willie Nelson teamed with Kimmie Rhodes, and Robert Plant teamed with Alison Krauss on their contributions–they wanted youth/age balance, and that’s the kind of mix I wanted more of on Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow.
Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow Track list:
Jersey Girl – Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band (Live at Meadowlands Arena, NJ – July 1981)
16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six – Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band
Gin-Soaked Boy – Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes
Jockey Full Of Bourbon – Los Lobos
Hang Down Your Head – Lucinda Williams
Temptation – Diana Krall
Yesterday Is Here – Bettye LaVette
Way Down In The Hole – The Blind Boys Of Alabama
Strange Weather – Marianne Faithfull
I Don’t Want To Grow Up – Ramones
Down There By The Train – Johnny Cash
House Where Nobody Lives – King Ernest
Picture In A Frame – Willie Nelson
Hold On – Madison Cunningham
The Long Way Home – Norah Jones
2:19 – John Hammond
Diamond In Your Mind – Solomon Burke
Trampled Rose – Alison Kraus and Robert Plant
Day After Tomorrow – Joan Baez
