The Eyeball Kid is reporting that Mr. Waits is doing the entire soundtrack for Roberto Benigni’s latest film, La Tigre e la Neve (The Tiger and the Snow).
[Via: The Eyeball Kid: La tigre e la neve]
Update (7/5/2005): According to later updates, the soundtrack is by Nicola Piovani but will feature a new song by Mr. Waits.
Thanks Alex.
The newly refurbished Usher Hall in Edinburgh, Scotland is looking to have Tom Waits play in the new space:
Italian classical star Andrea Bocelli, chart-toppers Franz Ferdinand and singer-songwriter Tom Waits are also to be wooed to perform in the A-listed building once a £24 million transformation is finished.
[Via: Scotsman.com News - Entertainment - Music - New-look Usher Hall to sing out for rock giants]
BTW, I am almost caught up. Once I am, I’ll be posting the best concert news collected so far . . .
I found this small reference in an interview with the choreographer Pina Bausch talking about her new piece “Nefes”:
The music you chose often gives a strong atmosphere to the piece — here the works of Mercan Dede, Astor Piazzolla and Tom Waits
[Via: The Japan Times Online]
Then, while catching up on the Raindogs newsgroup, I found that Jarlath had done some more digging and found that the actual song used in the piece is “All the World Is Green” from Blood Money.
[Via: www.pina-bausch.de]
Has anyone out there seen this work and want to share a review?
Mr. Waits appears on the cover of Word Magazine this month. Apparently, this magazine is only available in the UK and they don’t publish online, but I thought it was worth passing along the heads up. If nothing else, it’s a good cover shot.
[Via: Word - At last! Something to read!]
Mr. Waits will be one of the judges for this year’s International Songwriting Competition. So get your pens out and start cranking out those jingles out because all entries must be in by September 15th.
[Via: International Songwriting Competition - Judges and Prizes]
BookTelevision and Bravo! Canada will be airing a documentary about beat hipster Ken Nordine. According to the press release, the documentary will feature an interview with Mr. Waits along with others like Laurie Anderson and Billy Corgan.
The show will air on July 20th on BookTelevision and the 21st on Bravo. Check it out if you get a chance.
[Via: Canada NewsWire Group]
Well, there seems to be a lot of legal news about Mr. Waits these days. Following on the heels of Opel case, comes the following story from Reuters:
Third Story Music, a Los Angeles-based music publishing firm and the successor to the production company that managed singer-songwriter Tom Waits early in his career, has filed a federal suit against Warner Music Group, alleging that Waits has been shortchanged on the sale of digital downloads.
[Via: ABC News: Publisher sues Warner Music over Waits tunes]
At its essence, this story has much more to do with the current state of intellectual property than it does with Mr. Waits himself, but it’s an interesting story. After the long debate about the legality of file-sharing networks, comes an interesting debate about the physical nature of digital music. This case revolves around whether a digital download can be considered as the same as a song on a physical CD.
From what I can gather, artists get different rates depending on how their label distributes their music. In this specific example, Mr. Waits (through Third Story Music) gets either 9% or 13% (I have no idea how this gets triggered) of the revenue for each copy of “Closing Time” that Warner sells. However, if Warner licenses the song “Grapefruit Moon” to appear on the next version of “Now That’s What I Call Music”, then Mr. Waits would receive either 25% or 50% of the revenue. Complicated, yeah, I agree, but what in law isn’t.
Third Story is arguing that selling a copy of “Grapefruit Moon” on iTunes is tantamount to licensing the song to a compilation album. Warner Music on the other hands is arguing that because the sale is no different than selling the whole album in Best Buy, that they shouldn’t have to pay the increased percentage.
In any case, this seems to have caused quite a little stir on a few IP related blogs I read. There has been a thriving little debate on both Madisonian Theory and Corante that I thought I would pass along:
Mr. Waits is up for this year’s Mojo Inspiration Award, sponsored obviously by Mojo Magazine.
[Via: MOJO HONOURS LIST]
Why, doesn’t it just fit that Mr. Waits’ would be an admirer of another fellow surrealist, Salvador Dali? Well, who knows if he’s really a fan, but I did find this tiny and extremely obscure reference to a Waits visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see a Dali Exhibit:
Actor Jim Carrey, musician Tom Waits and Mary McAleese, president of Ireland, were among visitors from all 50 states, Asia, Europe and Latin America who viewed the Dali show before it closed on Monday.
[Via: PennLive.com: NewsFlash - News in brief from Philadelphia]
Here are some details on an upcoming book release party for Innocent When You Dream:
Coming soon to one of the coolest bars in NYC:
book launch party for Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader
Edited by Mac Montandon with a foreward by Frank Blank of the PixiesJune 14, 2005, 7:00 pm
KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues)
New York CityMeet the editor in person, stick around for the win-a-book Waits trivia hour, and take advantage of the “Jockey Full of Bourbon” drink special.
[Via: STRANGEco }} NEWS } Innocent When You Dream book party]
NPR’s All Things Considered program has a fairly in depth radio piece that’s worth a listen:
While, not exactly news, Sam McManis of The News Tribune wrote an interesting editorial on the changing attitude of musicians towards commerical uses of their music in response to the Opel case:
Leave it to Tom Waits, that gravel-voiced rock ’n’ roll curmudgeon, to turn an ordinary whiny celebrity press statement into a work of sheer poetry. . .
In any event, Waits’ comment and his suit prompted two responses from me:
1. Aren’t we all Tom Waits sound-alikes whenever we, you know, clear our throats?
2. His comment, funny as it is, shows a distinct and widening generation gap among rock stars.
[Via: Sorry, Tom, rockers jumped on ad bandwagon long ago | TheNewsTribune.com | Tacoma, WA]
Well, considering all of the catching up I have to do, I might as well be thorough and clean up everything. I have a long stack of emails and links that I had been meaning to post but just never got around to it. So here’s my chance and I’m taking it . . .
This link was posted on the Raindog’s Mailing List back last November. It’s a video clip of composer (”Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind”), producer (”Extraordinary Machine”, Fiona Apple) and one-man-band guy, Jon Brion doing a pretty dead on imitation of Tom Waits covering Radiohead’s angst epic “Creep”. There’s also a pretty good representation, despite the poor video and sound quality, of Brion’s unique one-man-band act.
Well, I know in my last post that I promised a long string of updates very shortly. Unfortunately, soon after making that post I discovered, to my amazement, that pouring a whole gin and tonic into a laptop has the amazing effect of killing the whole thing. I know, it’s shocking isn’t it. So, I’ve been working on a temporary computer for the last few weeks and just didn’t have the time to get my blog posting tools back into place.
However, the laptop has been returned to service and I’m back in business. I’ll be posting several updates over the next few days, baring any further drunken accidents. However, one result of this downtime is that I lost quite a bit of email so I’ll be culling results from several of the other Tom Waits sites. I hope they’ll forgive my intrusion. In any case, I thought I owed an explanation and there it is.
