Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards

Imagine Waits being your dad and having him tell you a bedtime story where you're all alone on the planet, the moon is a piece of rotten wood, and the Earth is an overturned piss pot. Imagine Waits being your zoology professor, revealing the brutality and grittiness of slavery and copulation at all levels of the animal kingdom, including you and your neighbors. Imagine Waits doing an album of nothing but Child ballads...oh man, I'm gonna send him a letter! This is not some kind of greatest hits compilation. Quite the opposite: it's got rarities and unreleased tracks, those orphaned songs that "fell behind the stove while making dinner". You ever clean out the gunk that falls behind the stove? It's greasy, grimy, and probably full of flavor if you could just be brave enough to try it. Them. Not "it". Though these were released together as a three-disc set, they were consciously separated along lines of influence and style. Brawlers explores the blues and consequently rock, Bawlers sees Waits diving into heart-wrenching ballads, and Bastards focuses more on his megaphone-toting, carnivalesque experimentation. Waits excels at all three, of course, but you can pick what to listen to based on your mood or interest.