Nighthawks At The Diner

 
Nighthawks At The Diner cover
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3 - 6 weeks
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Tom Waits
Nighthawks At The Diner

[ Warner / CD ]

Release Date: Thursday 25 October 1990

This item is only available to us via Special Order. We should be able to get it to you in 3 - 6 weeks from when you order it.

For his third album, Nighthawks at the Diner, Tom Waits set up a nightclub in the studio, invited an audience, and cut a 70-minute, two-LP set of new songs. It's an appropriate format for compositions that deal even more graphically and, for the first time, humorously with Waits' late-night world of bars and diners. The love lyrics of his debut album had long since given way to a comic lonely-guy stance glimpsed in "Emotional Weather Report" and "Better Off Without a Wife." But what really matters is the elaborate scene-setting of songs like the six-and-a-half-minute "Spare Parts," the seven-and-a-half-minute "Putnam County," and especially the 11-and-a-half-minute "Nighthawk Postcards" that are essentially poetry recitations with jazz backing. Waits is a colorful tour guide of midnight L.A., raving over a swinging rhythm section of Jim Hughart bass and Bill Goodwin drums, with Pete Christlieb wailing away on tenor sax between paragraphs and Mike Melvoin trading off with Waits on piano runs. You could call it overdone, but then, this kind of material made its impact through an accumulation of miscellaneous detail, and who's to say how much is too much?

All Music Guide - William Ruhlmann

Tracks:

1 Opening Intro (2:59)
2 Emotional Weather Report (3:43)
3 Intro (2:18)
4 On a Foggy Night (3:49)
5 Intro (1:55)
6 Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac With Susan Michelson) (4:13)
7 Intro (3:22)
8 Better off Without a Wife (3:53)
9 Nighthawk Postcards (11:27)
10 Intro (0:55)
11 Warm Beer and Cold Women (5:21)
12 Intro (0:48)
13 Putnam County (7:34)
14 Spare Parts I (A Nocturnal Emission) (6:23)
15 Nobody (2:49)
16 Intro (0:41)
17 Big Joe and Phantom 309 (6:30)