Bone Machine: The Operator's Manual

This is a long CMJ radio network interview with Tom Waits, featuring tracks from the album of the same name. This isn't an album, just an interview in which Waits explains what the album is about and the process of its creation and production. He says the albums started with the title, so in that sense, this is a concept. He wanted songs that would fit the title "Bone Machine", so songs that evoke a sense of horror, songs about the inevitability of death, since it is a fact that we all die screaming. And not only us, but everything. The earth first, and eventually the universe. There's no escape. One thing I love about this interview is how he describes songs like they're entities: he describes the creative process in such beautiful metaphorical terms, like when he talks about how a song is "sick", meaning a song isn't working in a certain context or a song is unfinished... it's "sick", and Waits, as a kind of doctor, has to diagnose the song's sickness and help it get better. He also talks about the listener's relationship to songs, saying that an individual song is like a bar of soap. You can hold it in your hand, and sometimes your relationship with the song lasts only as long as a bar of soap, and once it's gone, you move on to the next song. He discusses how his performance aesthetic is changing, too, going from a guy who sat at a piano to a more physical, animal show and how it's connected to the spirit of music that, in some ways, can work as a poltergeist. Perhaps this is connected to Waits getting older and getting angrier, which is why he thinks his percussion has improved. Because he gets to hit shit with more gusto. Waits mentions religion so many times in this interview, which I find interesting, as he's getting it from both his wife and his mother, and that influence finds its way onto the album in frightening clarity.