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.
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Covering the Dead means a whole lot more than just playing the tunes; to give their songs credibility, there also needs to be a recreation of their spirit. That Dave McMurray has it in spades is immediately apparent from the first few bars of “Fire on the Mountain,” the opening track on his new album Grateful Deadication. That faithful dancing-bear swagger, halfway between a lope and a canter, is indubitably present, correct and reporting for duty. Few bands have such an unmistakable footprint, and to reproduce that–and with your own voice, yet–is little short of remarkable.