Credits:

Tom Waits

Description:

Tom Waits has said: “I like a beautiful song that tells you terrible things. We all like bad news out of a pretty mouth.” When it comes to the material on Blood Money, I don’t know if I can call Waits’ mouth pretty, but he certainly offers plenty of bad news in a very attractive, compelling way. Released simultaneously with Alice, a recording of songs written in 1990, Blood Money is a set of 13 songs written by Waits and Kathleen Brennan in collaboration with dramatist Robert Wilson. The project was a loose adaptation of the play Woyzeck, originally written by German poet Georg Buchner in 1837. The play was inspired by the true story of a German soldier who was driven mad by bizarre army medical experiments and infidelity, which led him to murder his lover — cheery stuff, to be sure. Thematically, this work — with its references to German cabarets and nostalgia — echoes Waits’ other Wilson coll