Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Rolling Stone - Tom Waits' Big Reveal: New Clip for 'Hell Broke Luce"


If you are on the Tom Waits mailing list, you have been getting some intriguing images over the last couple of days promising a "big reveal" Tuesday morning - and the reveal was a new and very cool/strange (would you expect any less) video for the song "Hell Broke Luce," from the 2011 Bad As Me album.

Rolling Stone posted the video and some background to go with it.


Singer dropped vague hints about video over the past week


By Rolling Stone

August 7, 2012

What a build-up: Tom Waits has spent the past week dropping hints about an announcement he had planned for today, and the Web was thick with speculation: Could it be a tour? New music? A concert cruise? Nope. Turns out it was the release of a new video for "Hell Broke Luce," a scabrous, blackly comic anti-war song from last year's Bad As Me. The clip was the source of various surreal images posted on Waits' website last week, depicting the singer sporting an eyepatch and a scimitar, underwater flanked by boxy sharks (that turn out to be submarines) and poking an oversized spoon at a roaring fire.

Directed by Matt Mahurin, the video is as gritty as the song, as Waits pulls a small house through an arid, blasted landscape; over the ocean while surrounded by warring flotillas; and under water, trailed by boxy shark submarines.

Waits addressed the speculation over his clues in a statement: "As most of you guessed, it’s a tour . . . a tour de force!" The singer said he and Kathleen Brennan, his wife and songwriting partner, envisioned the song as "an enlightened drill sergeant yelling the hard truths of war to a brand new batch of recruits. The video grew from the gnawing image of a soldier pulling his home, through a battlefield, at the end of a rope. I think you will agree, it's uplifting and fun."

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