The only odd thing about a Tom Waits 8-bit album is that Waits didn’t put it out himself. Instead, that glitchy honor went Nick Budd, who passionately re-recorded 1999’s Mule Variations, and turned it into Donkey Kong Variations: A Tribute to Tom W8s. Here’s what he told Noisey:
How do you go about 8 biting an artist’s work?
With this album I had the music book and I basically keyed in everything (not in real time) and made sure the notes were the same values, everything was in the correct key, all that. I then mixed everything and made sure the levels were straight without getting too wild with edits (I wanted them to be quite linear and still straight up songs) and that was it really. (Via)
If only the album had been released in 1993. Super Nintendo’s Eyeball Kid would’ve been huge.
