"Everything You Can Think"

'Alice', 2002

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We can trace the journey of “Everything You Can Think” through four chronological versions.

First, here is the version from the Alice demos. This is Tom Waits on his own, running through the songs he has written for his 1992 Robert Wilson stage collaboration Alice. On “Everything You Can Think,” he plays what sounds like either a harmonium or a calliope again. The lyrics are already pretty set, but this solo version brings a very different sound than the noisier album version. The best part is his maniacal laughing at the end.

That was a demo for, as mentioned, a play, which premiered in Hamburg in 1992. So the next version comes from that play, sung not by Tom but by the two actors, Annette Paulmann (Alice) and Stefan Kurt (White Rabbit). You can see a small snippet of the stage version here:

And you can hear the full thing here from the play’s opening night:

The funny thing is this actually sounds more like Tom Waits than the demo, at least more like the Tom Waits version we know from Alice. The chaotic percussion is there; it’s a little faster and more menacing. This version, though, is a duet. Alice enters halfway through, at which point it sounds pretty different.

On that same opening night, December 19 1992 in Hamburg, Tom took the stage after the play ended to sing two of the songs himself. It is the only time he has ever sung “Everything You Can Think” live. He’s singing with the production’s musicians, so naturally the arrangement is the same. Now, of course, it sounds fully like Tom Waits! Complete with the nutty laughing at the end.

(Note the video footage comes from the OTHER song he sang that night, “Reeperbahn,” which is why it’s not synced up)

Finally, of course, the studio version he released on the Alice album a decade later. The music is less different from the stage version than I would have expected. A fun fact though: One of the percussion instruments you can hear is a four-foot seed pod from Indonesia (say it like he does in “What’s He Building”: “In-do-neee-sia”). “The pods are four feet long and they twist like pasta when they dry,” Tom told an interviewer. “There are like 12 massive seeds inside, each bigger than a hockey puck. I love the sound of it, a big, mean, low rattling.”