Throughout his career, everyones favorite swamp blues troubadour Tom Waits has created milestone albums that serve both to refine the music that has come before, and to signal a new phase in his career: Rain Dogs and Mule Variations are both counted by fans as among these pivotal works. Then came Bad As Me, his first studio album of all new music since 2004's Real Gone, which finds Tom Waits in possibly the finest voice of his career and at the height of his songwriting powers, working with a veteran team of gifted musicians and longtime co-writer/ producer Kathleen Brennan.
"Since his career-changing one-two punch of Swordfishtrombones (1983) and Rain Dogs (1985), Waits's music has uneasily fit into two broad categories: ballads and banging. On Bad As Me, neither mode has been better since those two earlier successes. For those who mourn the passing of the easy-to-love melodies and sentimental turns of his years on Asylum Records, there's "Last Leaf": Waits and Keith Richards join their cracked, creaky voices in a regretful old-man duo, as a tenacious leaf hangs on to its tree..." - Robert Baird, Stereophile Magazine, January 2012 issue, pg. 135