Alice

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Alice is one of the most distinctive of all Tom Waits' creations, occupying its own corner in the odd-angled room that is Tom Waits' body of work. While there are the familiar parts, the redoubtable ragged voice, jazz ballads and poignant musings on death and longing, the whole is strange and exotic. Waits uses fantasy, exotic characters and images to evoke a man's inner world of loss and longing in a devastatingly beautiful atmosphere made of sorrow and reverie, insanity and resignation. It's a lyrical melancholia, a feeling that creeps in on the arms of Stroh violins and unabashed poetry.

Alice, once dubbed "the lost Tom Waits masterpiece" by the press, was originally done as an avant-garde opera directed by Robert Wilson for Hamburg's Thalia Theater in the winter of 1992, and only later was recorded and released in 2004. It's an odyssey Waits and Kathleen Brennan created together, in what is becoming one of the epic collaborations in music, going on over twenty years now. The work is loosely based on Lewis Carroll's obsession with young Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired his Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass.

"Alice," said Waits, "is adult songs for children, or children's songs for adults. It's a maelstrom or fever-dream, a tone poem, with torch songs and waltzes...an odyssey in dream logic and nonsense."