Bastards - 2018 European Anti- label Reissue 19-track 2LP Set

2018 European Anti- label Remastered 180 Gram 2LP reissue... originally issued as an integrated part of iconic singer/songwriters 'Orphans' titled 2009 7LP Box set of outtakes, rarities, soundtrack tunes, and compilation-only cuts, 'Bastards' is the Tom Waits setting for a the edgy, friktious experimental music album... featuring songs written by Waits himself as well as by late 60ies San Francisco legend, Alexander Lee "Skip" Spence... from Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape... and lo-fi, outsider avant-pop singer/songwriter Daniel Johnston, Bertold Brecht & Kurt Weill and beat poets Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac. 

The albums has been remastered by Kathleen Brennan and her husband and musical collaborator Tom Waits - pressed onto 180 gram vinyls and delivered in lyrics and credits inners - ultimately in a gatefold picture cover. 

Tracklisting:

Side 1:
1 What Keeps Mankind Alive 2:10 (Written By Bertold Brecht, Kurt Weill)
2 Children's Story 1:43 (Written By Georg Büchner)
3 Heigh Ho 3:33 (Written By Winston Churchill)
4 Army Ants 3:26
5 Books Of Moses 2:50 (Written By Alexander Lee Spence)

Side 2:
1 Bone Chain 1:04
2 Two Sisters 4:56
3 First Kiss 2:41
4 Dog Door 2:43
4 Redrum 1:12

Side 3:
1 Nirvana 2:13 (Written By Charles Bukowski)
2 Home I'll Never Be 2:28 (Written By Jack Kerouac)
3 Poor Little Lamb 1:44
4 Altar Boy 2:48
5 The Pontiac 1:54
6 Spidey's Wild Ride 2:04

Side 4:
1 King Kong 5:29 (Written By Daniel Johnston)
2 On The Road 4:15 (Written By Jack Kerouac)
3 Dog Treat 2:57
4 Missing My Son 3:38

Tom Waits wrote in August 2006 when working on the "Orphans" boxset: "When I was small I always thought that songwriters sat alone at upright pianos in cramped smoky little rooms with a bottle and an ashtray and everything came in the window blew through them and came out of the piano as a song... and in a weird way that is exactly what happens.
What's Orphans? I don't know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.
At the center of this record is my voice. I try my best to chug, stomp, weep, whisper, moan, wheeze, scat, blurt, rage, whine, and seduce. With my voice, I can sound like a girl, the boogieman, a Theremin, a cherry bomb, a clown, a doctor, a murderer - I can be tribal. Ironic. Or disturbed. My voice is really my instrument.
Kathleen and I wanted the record to be like emptying our pockets on the table after an evening of gambling, burglary, and cow tipping. We enjoy strange couplings, that's how we got together. We wanted Orphans to be like a shortwave radio show where the past is sequenced with the future, consisting of things you find on the ground, in this world and no world, or maybe the next world. Whatever you imagine that to be.
If a record really works at all, it should be made like a homemade doll with tinsel for hair and seashells for ears stuffed with candy and money. Or like a good woman's purse with a Swiss army knife and a snake bite kit.
Orphans contains songs for all occasions. Some of the songs were written in turmoil and recorded at night in a moving car, others were written in hotel rooms and recorded in Hollywood during big conflamas. That's when conflict weds drama. At any rate these are the ones that survived the flood and were rescued from the branches of trees after the water's retreat.
Gathering all this material together was like rounding up chickens at the beach. It's not like you go into vault and check out what you need. Most of it was lost or buried under the house. Some of the tapes I had to pay ransom for to a plumber in Russia. You fall into the vat. We started to write just to climb out of the vat. Then you start listening and sorting and start writing in response to what you hear. And more recording. And then you get bit by a spider, go down the gopher hole, and make a whole different record. That was the process pretty much the last three years.
Then we met Karl Derfler, a wizard engineer who works at Bay Side Studios in Richmond, CA, in the science fiction part of town. A battlefield medic, he did a Lazarus on a number of the songs and recorded all the new material.
On Orphans there is a mambo about a convict who breaks out of jail with a fishbone, a gospel train song about Charlie Whitman and John Wilkes Boothe, a delta blues about a disturbing neighbor, a spoken word piece about a woman who was struck by lightening, an 18th century Scottish madrigal about murderous sibling rivalry, an American backwoods a cappella about a hanging. Even a song by Jack Kerouac and a spiritual with my own personal petition to the Lord with prayer.. There's even a show tune about an old altar boy and a rockabilly song about a young man who's begging to be lied to.
I think you will find more singing and dancing here than usual. But I hope fans of more growling, more warbling, more barking, more screeching won't be disappointed either."