You can hear the new Tom Waits” album, “Bad As Me,” for a week before its Oct. 24 release. It”ll only cost you a little information. And no, as the video suggests below, you don”t have to crawl into a rusted old car to hear it.
It seems weird to use the words Tom Waits and data mining in the same sentence, but if you go to official “Bad As Me” website and put in your name and email address, you will be sent a code allowing you access to a listening party. (Thanks to Pitchfork for the tip). You will also get five codes to share with your friends. It apparently takes a little time though. We applied for our code almost an hour ago and are still waiting behind the virtual velvet rope for admission.
[More after the jump…]
The album, out on Anti-, is Waits” 17th studio set. As you know, Waits delivered this wonderfully wacky video about his “private party” and its non-existence. It”s worth it just to hear Waits say “We have a situation here.” Plus, he makes the most convincing case we”ve ever heard from an artist about how he feels about his music leaking out on the internet before its time. Or as he says, “If you were having a birthday and starting eating your cake and opened up all your presents and started to play with your toys. Would you be okay with that?”
My colleague and No. 1 Waits fan Katie Hasty wrote about “Bad As Me” track “Brawler” here and the title track here. We ran the video about the listening party first there, but we”re embedding it again to make it even easier for you to watch since it”s just so Waitsian.