Countless musicians have been inspired by The Anthology of American Folk Music, Harry Smith’s 1950s box-set that brought together the strangest manifestations of blues and country. Tom Waits is evidently well schooled in these crackly dispatches, but he has always seemed keener to invent his own legends rather than borrow them from hillbilly primitives. Waits’s songs are full of yellow dogs and girls like “cheap motels”, sellers of “opium, fireworks and lead”, wily jailbirds who can open locks with fishbones.

It is fitting, then, that this beatnik mythographer has authored an encyclopaedia of curiosities to match Smith’s work. With 54 tracks spread over three CDs, Orphans . . . is the sort of grand endeavour that would seem bloated and pretentious coming from most artists. Waits, thankfully, carries his ambitions lightly. It appears that the record began as a compilation album, where Waits could gather rarities such as the majestic Books of Moses. Clearly, the project went agreeably off the rails.

All the digging for ephemera must have provoked a new streak of creativity in Waits and Kathleen Brennan, his wife and collaborator, since 30 of these 54 songs are new. The whole package may look daunting: a carnival of hobo philosophy and junkyard clank for obsessives only. In fact, it is characteristically perverse that two of these three thematically organised discs — Brawlers and Bawlers — showcase Waits at his most accessible as well as richly inventive.

Bastards is risky territory for neophytes, filled with stuff one suspects that even Waits finds eccentric. Bawlers, though, focuses on ruffled but stately piano ballads such as The World Keeps Turning (sourced from 2000’s Pollock soundtrack), a palliative to those who favour the nighthawk romance of his 1970s albums. Brawlers is better still, all picaresque storytelling and exuberant rock’n’roll. Here, too, is a departure — Road to Peace is a swaggering blues track about a Palestinian suicide bomber, Israeli retribution and the culpability of George W. Bush.

As Orphans . . . proves, Waits has made brilliant art by inhabiting an arcane world of his own imagination. Road to Peace tantalisingly suggests that, for his next trick, Waits could move his operations into a real world that is every bit as chaotic and bizarre.

(Anti)

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