Alice by Tom Waits

Alice, Tom Waits' fourteenth studio album, came out on Anti- in 2002, at the same time as its twin, Blood Money, and it had been a long time coming. The songs were written a decade earlier by Waits and his wife and collaborator Kathleen Brennan for Alice, an opera made with theater director Robert Wilson, with whom Waits had already made The Black Rider. Blood Money collects the songs from their next project together, Woyzeck.

Waits and Brennan produced it themselves, and this is the tender side of that famous gravel voice: slow, smoky ballads and cabaret-flavored laments that sound like they were found in the back room of a shuttered music hall. The title track is a woozy, late-night lullaby, and the whole record has the same bruised, dreamlike glow. It's Waits the balladeer, more heartsick than hellraising.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.