Gish-era Smashing Pumpkins: Reissued in 2011, so it counts!

​Reports from the holiday-party front indicate that 2011 was another long and lonely year for the fiction writers and memoirists of New York, who were kept company at home all day long mainly by various "internet friends" and related applications, as well as their favorite songs/albums/radio shows. Below is a totally non-scientific list of 2011's Top 10 pieces of music for writing, as supplied by the authors of recent books.

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Tom Waits' Bad As Me, his first studio album since 2004, is due out Oct. 25, and yesterday the title track—a bit of theatrical barroom-blues stomp over which Waits hiccups the lyrics while a guitar and a violin fight it out—had its unofficial premiere online. It's very very good in a "fever dream that you'll keep hitting replay on" way. There's a listening party at Waits' official site, but it seems to be overwhelmed by traffic at the moment, so check out the embed below.

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The 2011 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony
The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel
Monday, March 14

Better Than: Whatever was happening at Death by Audio tonight that Bruce Springsteen didn't show up to, for whatever reason.

First off, let's tell you what you want to hear: Tom Waits stole the show.

Introduced via improvised ramble by brother-in-scraggle Neil Young, Waits accepted his Rock Hall induction with his trademark stream of comical platitudes, zen-like aphorisms, and dry half-truths. It looked like he was reading them from his passport.

Here are some of the best ones:

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-- After abruptly announcing that Nine Inch Nails's appearance at Bonnaroo last month would be the band's last US show ever, Trent Reznor has decided to let fans down a little slower. NIN will play a series of holy-shit-they're-playing-there club shows later this summer to mark the band's supposed farewell. In New York, the band will hit Webster Hall, Terminal 5, and the Bowery Ballroom. Reznor writes the shows will be "informal affairs in medium to small venues with longer set-lists, possible special guests, cool openers and other surprises." The band will also play Los Angeles and Chicago. Dates and ticket details haven't been announced yet, but get ready to start reloading the ticketing page.

--New York Congressman Peter King  is thrilled with the response to his slightly insensitive YouTube video. "I think I hit a raw nerve," King told the New York Post. The congressman, who is considering a run for senate, said his office has been flooded with hundreds of phone calls and e-mails, 60 percent of them positive. Jackson fans are notoriously rabid in their devotion, and don't seem too happy with King's underwhelming sensitivity. A Jackson fan created a site to raise money for whoever runs against King in the race for the third congressional district in 2010. So far, more than $3,000 has been raised.
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Perfect Sound Forever, friend-of-SOTC Jason Gross' long-running online music mag, has an excerpt from Lowside of the Road, Barney Hoskyns' new Tom Waits biography. (Here's the first chapter, actually.) The PSF bit concerns Tom's transformation from sweet '70s crooner to deranged '80s junkyard-dog carnival barker. Like the pretty great 33 1/3 book on Swordfishtrombones, it cites Tom's wife, Kathleen Brennan as a major godsend/influence in this and other regards -- evidently she's the one who got him into Captain Beefheart, which is of importance roughly as seismic as introducing Ted Nugent to firearms.