Tom Waits, Alice
An effective children's story depends on a perfect balance of menace and wonder. Disney golly-gee'd Lewis Carroll's Alice stories into toothlessness, while Jefferson Airplane overplayed their darkness — the ominous "White Rabbit" is practically an anti-drug commercial. But Tom Waits is the ideal carnival barker to lure kiddies to the other side of the looking glass. His voice suitably animated and wheezy as a dilapidated accordion, his spirit possessed by a giddily insatiable appetite for decadence, Waits offers a temptation that's equal parts alluring and terrifying, a balance of excitement and fear best summed up when he asserts, "Everything you can think of is true."
Waits 'version of Wonderland is like a Bowery flophouse transplanted to Weimar Germany, populated by two-faced boys ("Poor Edward") and ranting Teutons ("Kommienezuspadt") instead of manic rabbits and murderous queens — in short, a place recognizable to anyone who's followed his career-long fascination with what he once dubbed "a world going on underground."
Originally composed for a 1992 Robert Wilson stage production, the songs here occasionally feel programmatic and, as a piece, can lack narrative flow. But most of the material stands on its own, even out of context, especially the title track, one of his finest love songs to date.
