The Black Rider

by

Tom Waits
Edit

Release type:

studio album

First released:

Nov 2 1993

Overview Edit

The Black Rider is an album by Tom Waits, released in 1993 on Island Records. The album contains studio versions of songs Waits wrote for the play The Black Rider, directed by Robert Wilson and co-written by William S. Burroughs. The play is based on the German folktale Der Freischütz, which had previously been made into an opera by Carl Maria von Weber.

The Black Rider premiered on March 31, 1990, at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany. Its world English-language premiere occurred in 1998 at the Edmonton International Fringe Festival.

Waits's collaboration with Wilson would later continue with the plays Alice (1992) and Woyzeck (2000), the music to which was released on the albums Alice and Blood Money, respectively.

There is a German vinyl release of this album featuring quite different tracks. It was released by Alka-Seltzer Medien GmbH in 1999 containing some liner notes concerning the Black Rider stage play. The vinyl is transparent red with only "A" and "B" printed on the labels respectively.

The Overview appearing in this section is attributed to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Rider_(album). Portions of this Overview may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. Additional terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.

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This particular version Edit

Record label:

Island Records

Catalog number:

518559

Release dates:

Nov 2 1993 in United States

2 other versions of this release

Genres

Alternative Rock, Experimental Rock, Singer-Songwriter, Spoken Word. Vote on Genres

What do Amazon.com customers think?

Waits's best work

The song "November" is a kind of microcosm for this album, which evokes skeletal trees, looming clouds, piles of dead leaves, and harrowing winds. A post-halloween, pre-dead of winter atmosphere pervades this record. While Tom Waits is a great original talent, with piles and piles of brilliant songs, he tends to "show his hand" too much, so that his act is revealed as just that--an act. And since most of his material depends on you buying into his persona(e), sometimes you come away unconvinced.…

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Written by M. E Mattson

Not the Original Cast

If you've seen The Black Rider on stage in Germany, at BAM or maybe even LA, this is not the original cast recording. As much as I love Tom Waits, I need to hear the folks who sang it to me the first time. Sorry Tom, you're one of my favs, but to say this is the Studio Cast is implying something that it is not.

Written by I am The Reviewer

Track listing Edit

CD

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Lucky Day (overture)