Tom Waits

Tom Waits was born in 1949 in Pomona but grew up in San Diego. He began playing in the folk clubs of San Diego but moved to Los Angeles in 1972.

His dialect, made up of free associations in the style of Beat poetry, is married to an eclectic concept of the "song" that draws from several traditions of popular music: swing, blues, gospel, the marching bands of the Salvation Army, operetta, the soundtracks of western films, bebop, sacred hymns, etc. What makes the material uniform is Waits' voice, which is also the most improbable unifying element. That voice, in fact, is as musical (in the traditional sense of the term) as the back of a porcupine, as harmonious as an attack of neurasthenia. Yet the song possesses a unified and coherent tone, which seems to emanate from a gloomy and arcane psychic landscape, in which the singer assumes the archetypal features of the visionary outcast.

Waits' art is largely dedicated to the people of the defeated. The process of identification with outcasts, drifters and derelicts pushes itself toward theatrical solutions. Every song is arranged and interpreted according to the character, with a level of involvement that is more than simple acting.

The acquisition of increasingly sophisticated techniques progressively transformed Waits' degenerate art into an exercise that was almost baroque. The warm communicativeness of the early years became a cold exercise in intellectual music/theater. From outcast of the dark alleys of Los Angeles to refined Broadway composer; from urban hobo in the smoky clubs of the Strip to poet laureate of the petite bourgeoisie in the theaters of Times Square; from the convivial swing of the wee hours to theatrical opera, Waits underwent one of the most conspicuous mutations in the history of rock. The most barbaric of singer-songwriters turned out to be the most classical of them all.

When he first appeared on the scene, Tom Waits was a late beatnik in the most authentically eccentric "Kerouacian" vein, a hero of smoky clubs in which he dragged along his carcinogenic, hoarse and slurred voice, accompanied by a mini-orchestra performing a clumsy hybrid of jazz, rhythm and blues and Broadway show tunes.

Raised in a children's institution, former accordion soloist in polka bands of the Chicano neighborhoods of Los Angeles, dishwasher, ice-cream vendor, firefighter, doorman, nighttime entertainer of jazz cocktails, he began declaiming his free-verse compositions at the "Troubadour" in the intervals between acts. When Herb Cohen discovered him in 1971, Waits had already developed a highly original style, as documented on Early Years vol 1 & 2 (Edsel, 1992), which was essentially an eccentric version of lounge music.

His first seven albums arose from this mixture of music and life, somehow related to the kitsch satire of the "plastic city" pioneered by Frank Zappa. His strength still lay in the lyrics, stuffed with Beat-inspired, psychotic and logorrheic poetry, arousing curiosity more for the "Bukowskian" excesses of a vagabond lived life than for musical talent.

On Closing Time (Asylum, 1973) Waits reveals himself as a Randy Newman with less humor and more "black" inflections, whose main vehicle is the blues-style ballad (Martha, Ol' 55).

Tom Waits' artistic personality truly emerged on The Heart of Saturday Night (Asylum, 1974), thanks to producer Bones Howe, who chose instead to emphasize nocturnal atmospheres. Thus were born his first masterpieces: the poignant elegy of the title track, Diamonds On My Windshield, San Diego Serenade, Shiver Me Timbers, Drunk On The Moon.

The double album Nighthawks at the Diner (Asylum, 1975), a series of witty talking blues recorded live with jazz quartet accompaniment, is the drunken binge that condenses his spaced-out personality, and is also a sort of epic of dirty, disreputable Los Angeles and of its evocative nocturnal fauna (Spare Parts, Warm Beer And Cold Women).

Closing the period of melodramatic sketches over jazz textures are Small Change (Asylum, 1976) and Foreign Affairs (Asylum, 1977).

Small Change was the album that clarified the misunderstanding: the musichall was a tragedy. The piano was not just a nostalgic/parodistic gimmick, it was the tool of a poet. His voice was not poking fun at pop singers: it was a lyrical and desparate voice, wailing on behalf of humankind. The bulk of the album contains the drunk, melancholy vignettes of Jitterbug Boy, The Piano Has Been Drinking, Invitation To The Blues, I Can't Wait To Get Off Work, that echo pop ballads, blues dirges and jazz standards while mocking them all. The tragicomedy peaks with the touching orchestral laments of Tom Traubert's Blues and I Wish I Was In New Orleans, the former a superb example of chamber pop, the latter a jazzy/bluesy lullaby. Waits toys with his own semantics when he apes Louis Armstrong in the dixieland jazz of Step Right Up and other amusing novelties. Paradoxically, his hoarse and repellent voice turns out to be the ideal vehicle to photograph those relics of urban subculture.

Foreign Affairs is an even more precarious work balancing easy-listening, existentialism and macabre irony (Foreign Affairs, Barber Shop, Muriel, Burma Shave, and the duet with Bette Midler on I Never Talk To Strangers). The places, characters and atmospheres are those of decadent intellectual neighborhoods.

His hoarse and ungainly voice is the ideal means for photographing those relics of metropolitan subculture.

In 1977 Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones fell in love, influencing each other's styles (alas, she was increasingly becoming a drug addict).

Blue Valentine (Asylum, 1978) marks a decisive turning point, because his mutterings and his film-noir tales (above all the lengthy $29.00 and Blue Valentine, both in his drunkest "nighttime" style) achieve more musical results. Although the bombastic jazz-paced dramatizations (Romeo Is Bleeding and Wrong Side Of The Road) and the pathetic nightclub sonatas (Christmas Card) remain his preferred manners, Waits paints some bloodcurdling rhythm'n'blues pieces sung in the register of Captain Beefheart (Whistling Past The Graveyard and above all A Sweet Little Bullet) that become veritable horror stories, as demonstrated by the even more spectral Red Shoes, immersed in disturbing swamp rhythms.
Waits' great social comedy draws equally from humor and pathos. The romantic epic of his derelicts drags itself along in a cocktail-lounge atmosphere that is the exact setting of the milieu being portrayed. The style absorbs rhythm'n'blues, George Gershwin, vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley.

Heartattack and Vine (Asylum, 1980) is the satori of the most depressed electric blues of the postwar era (the sleepy title-track, the melodramatic shout of Downtown, the Willie Dixon-style tribalisms of Til' The Money Runs Out, the drunken Mr. Siegal), but also with some of his grotesquely sentimental gags worthy of a Salvation Army band or a Broadway musical (Ruby's Arms and On The Nickel), along with the classic Jersey Girl. Waits indulges in minimal arrangements and funereal cadences, with a muted Hammond organ and a singing style oscillating between the hoarseness of Louis Armstrong and that of barrelhouse pianists.

In 1980 Waits married screenwriter Kathleen Brennan and the following year got rid of Cohen and Howe and moved to New York.

The second turning point came with Swordfishtrombones (Island, 1983), self-produced in Hollywood, on which more refined arrangements less tied to black music (accordion, bagpipes, marimba, Hammond organ, harmonium, trombone) transfigure the ballad form into a kind of poly-ethnic cabaret. Waits, a hoarse and visceral shouter in the driving, swinging epilepsy of Down Down Down and in the Southern boogie of Gin Soaked Boy, is in reality a skillful composer of surreal harmonies who naturally knows how to make use of folkloric motifs. Thus are born the sinister exotic noir of Shoreleave, with an almost pointillistic background of scattered Caribbean and dissonant sounds (Fred Tackett on guitar), the nonsense instrumental Dave The Butcher, for shrill/out-of-tune reed organ and percussive bass, and the swamp delirium of Trouble's Braids, recited over a crescendo of jungle percussion. Waits reveals himself as the greatest disciple of the total music of Frank Zappa (the heroic and martial band-music of In The Neighbourhood) and Captain Beefheart (Underground, a psychotic funeral sung in his typical guttural register, and 16 Shells From A 30-ought-six, with an equally ferocious werewolf-like phrasing over metallic percussion inviting occult tribal dances), but in a darker, even macabre sense, stripped of the exuberant prankishness of the freaks and instead sinking into existential weariness, moral pessimism and the desperate loneliness of so many failed lives. Thus the spectral emptiness of Town With No Cheer, a small classicizing requiem, and the many grief-stricken jazz-inflected lieder by candlelight, from Franks Wild Years, a spoken piece over organ and cocktail-lounge bass, to the closing instrumental Rainbirds, a sentimental and funereal version, almost in mourning, of America Drinks And Goes Home by Frank Zappa. This record, saturated with depressive, macabre and religious moods, is the soundtrack to a universal funeral. What is being buried is the grand circus of the plastic city.

Asylum Years (Asylum, 1984) is a double-disc anthology.

Waits starred in several Francis Ford Coppola films: One from the Heart (1982), The Outsiders (1983), Rumble Fish (1983) and The Cotton Club (1984). He then starred in Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law (1986) and Mystery Train (1989). He also starred in Christopher Cain's The Stone Boy (1984), Hector Babenco's Ironweed (1987), etc.

Rain Dogs (Island, 1985) is an even more meticulously crafted album featuring John Lurie, Robert Quine, Marc Ribot, and Keith Richards, and it is the logical culmination of the ethnic variety show inaugurated by the previous album. Decadent self-indulgence and bohemian clowning are dressed in the garb of a rock primitivism that leans more toward Beefheart s dadaist blues than Dylan s folk argot, and is light years away from the cocktail jazz of the early years. His hoarse, disjointed nonsense becomes more personal and concise, and together forms a highly stylized mosaic of popular music.

Increasingly close to the decadent, weary atmosphere of Expressionism is the music-hall dimension of his absurd nursery rhymes, each arranged with a different ethnic gag (the Caribbean tribalism of Singapore, the brass-band parade step of Cemetery Polka, the gypsy accordion of Rain Dogs). Waits art continues to stand out as the most chameleonic in rock, capable of alternating the most sinister nightmares (Big Black Mariah, a cross between voodoo rituals and the syncopations of the Stones, and Clap Hands, a swampy swamp-rock piece driven by metallic percussion) with the most mischievous period evocations (Jockey Full Of Bourbon, with an excellent solo by Ribot, and Tango Till They're Sore, returning to noir-film incantation). Between these extremes parade the archaic Delta blues (Gun Street Girl), the domestic serenade (Blind Love), the tender Cohen-like lullaby in emptiness (Time), the dance-hall boogie (Union Square), atmospheric bebop (Walking Spanish), even the flower-power melody of folk-rock (Hang Down Your Head), even the vibrant populist ballad in the Springsteen vein (Downtown Train, one of his dramatic masterpieces). The finale remains funereal, with Waits deliriously alone over a chorus of trumpets and trombones, before the lopsided cheerfulness of a marching band overwhelms everything...
Waits singing ranges across a vast spectrum of registers, at times resembling a voiceless falsetto and at others as ferocious as Beefheart s howl. The harmonies draw on thirty years of rock history, from the baion style of the Drifters to the jungle music of John Hassell, passing through anachronistic musical forms such as polka, rumba, tango, and big band. Fantasmagoric and frightening, the carnival of characters rushes forward like an indecipherable puzzle. Waits paranoid journey/nightmare through the labyrinth of the underclass increasingly resembles a modern Divine Comedy.

Franks Wild Years (Island, 1987), derived from a musical play in which Tom Waits himself (premiered in 1985 in Chicago) is also the protagonist, in turn derived from a song written four years earlier, is a kind of opera buffa that gives free rein to the junk culture that permeates Waits. It is also a cross-section of the misfits to whom Waits has dedicated his career.
It is also, and above all, a sonic journey that embraces different genres, techniques, clich s and moods. In addition to singing through a bullhorn, Waits uses homemade percussion and old junk-shop instruments.
The first act opens in the deepest depression with Hang On St Christopher, a marching-band fanfare, African polyrhythms and Beefheart-like guitar clangers. Straight To The Top is a hoarse Beefheartian delirium set to the frantic rhythm of a workmen s social club rumba, Blow Wind Blow is even a funeral march, a desperate lament for rag mandolin and spiritual organ over the moral ruins of the slums, while Yesterday Is Here drags itself along with a sparse, gloomy western motif. In Innocent When You Dream, one of his melodic masterpieces, a hoarse and slightly drunken tenor accompanies a street organ in a tear-jerking chant. Please Wake Me Up condenses into cacophony the sonic elements Waits mixes and accumulates to recreate the atmosphere of provincial life at the beginning of the century: street organs, marching bands, the sound of 78 rpm records, South American dances and melodramatic tenors. The poignant tone of the accordion turns some of the most tormented pieces (More Than Rain, Cold Cold Ground) into grey and nostalgic Parisian chansons, and it is no coincidence that the second act ends with one of these, Train Song, which laments the failure of all hopes. Apocalyptic pessimism offers flashes of serenity only in the clumsy tropical polka of I'll Be Gone (for accordion, marimba and trombone), in the drunken, hallucinatory Frank Sinatra-style jazz song of I'll Take New York, and in the dazed rag serenade of Telephone Call. Ribot is a co-protagonist in several songs, in particular Way Down in the Hole. It is the harshest and most melancholic record of his career, almost a point of no return for his unrestrained nihilism.

Waits took a long creative break, during which the main output was music for cinema: Big Time (Island, 1988), which recycles old songs for a documentary, and the soundtracks for One from the Heart (CBS, 1981) and Night on Earth (Island, 1992). The latter is possibly the best of his soundtracks (Good Old World, which is one of the few "sung" pieces, and at least Los Angeles Theme and Dragging A Dead Priest among the instrumentals).

The Black Rider (Island, 1993) is yet another theatrical work, premiered in 1990 in Hamburg by Robert Wilson, this time around with William Burroughs on "spoken-word". The album contains some of the music re-recorded by Waits with a different cast. The program is a little predictable, given Waits' catalogue, but nonetheless offers a glorious ride through the artifacts of American popular folklore. None of the pieces is meant to be a masterwork, but the whole is meant to evoke a place (America) and a time (before the deluge). Lucky Day Overture opens the parade with, appropriately, parade music and, inappropriately, hysterical ranting that evokes Adolf Hitler. That voice turns into a circus entertainer in The Black Rider, that harks back to the 1920s, the beginning of a long journey through the musical psyche of the USA (actually the tune is reminiscent of German cabaret), passing by the Broadway showtune of I'll Shoot the Moon and the funereal New Orleans fanfare of Lucky Day. and the street singer of Flash Pan Hunter. The whole proceedings, though, feels light and unfocused. Even the arrangements are not what they could be, given the cast. The Morricone-like setting of Just the Right Bullets and especially the nightmarish Cuban orgy of Gospel Train are the exceptions. But, for example, the African polyrhythmic percussions of Oily Night are wasted in a crescendo that doesn't seem to know why it is a crescendo. The instrumental tracks (notably the spastic industrial music of Gospel Train Orchestral and the demented chamber music of Black Box Theme) do not add much to the overall project (e.g., the Russian Dance is just that, a dance based on a Russian folk theme). Neither do the short "songs" (mostly spoken). The album ends, appropriately, with Carnival, that sorts of ties back with the circus of the beginning.

Alice (Epitaph, 2002), also dating from 1993 and also (originally) a theatrical soundtrack, is one of his most idyllic and ethereal works (despite the gothic theme of physical decay); in fact, an absolute oddity within his repertoire.
The delicate lounge jazz of Alice, caressed by vibraphone and alto sax, opens the album, but there are relatively few nods to his blues/jazz roots (Table Top Joe). There are still strong numbers of his nostalgic and demented musichall: Kommienezuepadt (one of his most hilarious ever), Everything You Can Think Of Is True, a waltzing tune that turns into an expressionist nightmare, and Reeperbahn. He returns, as he always does, growl or no growl, to the grand pop ballad for violin and piano (Flowers Grave, Poor Edward), and ever more often pens neoclassical arias (No One Knows I'm Gone, Lost In The Harbor). The top, as it is often the case with his mature albums, is reached with an elegy that is both funereal and rousing, Fish & Bird, the ideal fusion of New Orleans marching band, classical orchestra and jazz combo.

In 1991 Waits and his family moved north of San Francisco. During the 1990s, Waits was more active in cinema than in music. Waits composed the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991). In 1992 Waits quit drinking alcohol and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.

Bone Machine (Island, 1992), the first album of original and non-soundtrack material in seven years, features cameos by Rolling Stones' guitarist Keith Richards, Primus' bassist Les Claypool, Los Lobos' David Hidalgo, and the usual Ralph Carney. The album is schizophrenic in that it presents two (if not more) sides of Waits. On the one hand there are songs performed in a casual, amateurish or downright demented manner and sung in a psychotic register. Earth Died Screaming opens the proceedings on a gothic tone, a gamelan-like tribal dance with shaman-like shouting. The shamans transform into different alter-egos of Captain Beefheart in the stark spiritual-like All Stripped Down. The same madness pervades the spastic gospel of Such A Scream and the possessed street rant of In The Colosseum. The culmination of this ritual of primitive deconstruction is the voodoo novelty with reverbed guitar twang of Goin' Out West, like the Cramps jamming with Free.
On the lyrical front, Waits indulges in the usual mood of drunk melancholy with the dirge Dirt In The Ground, the country-ish lullaby A Little Rain, and the epic, romantic Whistle Down The Wind, the album's zenith of pathos. He even takes a stab at atmospheric music with Black Wings, whose guitar phrasing apes Ennio Morricone's celestial melodies, and the childish nursery-rhyme I Don't Wanna Grow Up seems to wash it all away with a smile.
Alternating yin with yang, Waits experiments a "call and response" style that percolates from one song into the next one. The whole is neither black nor white.
Whistle Down The Wind and Goin' Out West alone are worth the price of the CD.

Beautiful Maladies (Island, 1998) is an anthology of the early years.

Mule Variations (Epitaph, 1999), the first solo studio effort in seven years, celebrates Tom Waits' sudden popularity around the world. As his genius gets the recognitions that it had long deserved, Waits must have thought it wise to make an album that is a tribute to his own style and his own biography. This is an album of the middle age, and the album of a man who enjoys rural domestic bliss. His wife Kathleen Brennan co-wrote many of the album's sixteen songs. Old buddies Marc Ribot and Ralph Carney attend the ceremony.
But the relaxed mood ends up draining Waits' inspiration. There are some of his trademark vignettes: the dissonant James Brown-ian stomping rhythm'n'blues of Big In Japan, the Captain Beefheart-ian voodoo dance of Filipino Box Spring Hog, the hysterical spiritual-like shout Eyeball Kid (accompanied only by noises and found percussion). But little else truly stands out. He devotes a substantial chunk of the collecetion to drunken blues moans (Cold Water, Lowside of the Road, Chocolate Jesus), but we have heard them before. On a much more serious tone than ever, he unveils the ballad Hold On (Waits who does Dylan), the solemn piano hymn Picture in a Frame, the moving piano and accordion elegy Georgia Lee, the whispered piano ballad Take It With Me the country yarn House Where Nobody Lives. Then he tops them all with the magniloquent gospel Come On Up To the House that signals his acquired peace of mind. This is one of Waits' "lightest" albums ever. His wife's exorcism has worked, and Waits is finally free of his demons. But it looks like those demons "were" his music.

Blood Money (Epitaph, 2002), another co-production with his wife Kathleen Brennan and another set of songs inspired by a Robert Wilson opera, is an impeccable work, whose only problem is to be too "Waits-ian". Waits recycles old tricks, and some are, indeed, very impressive. Misery Is the River of the World is martial lounge music propelled by tuba-like bass clarinet and accompanied by Caribbean-happy marimba. A melancholy acid-jazz number such as Everything Goes to Hell is a sophisticated study in contrast (voodoo bongos and a swinging clarinet collide). Best would have been the dissonant chamber music for small ensemble of Knife Chase and Calliope, had he chosen to developed it beyond the sketchy two minutes that they are. Too many songs, however, are mere repetitions of old ideas, and sometimes in a childish manner, like God's Away On Business (a cartoonish rigmarole sung in a monster-like register at a tribal pace) and Starving In The Belly Of A Whale (grotesque gargantuan rhythm, fierce pirate-like singalong).
Over the years Waits' growl (that originally was a clone of Captain Beefheart's) slowly mutated into a clone of Louis Armostrong's. Thus the nostalgic and almost funereal elegy Coney Island Baby, the casual serene meditation of All The World Is Green, and the playful lullaby A Good Man Is Hard To Find.
Whether serious or ironic, Waits keeps finding new ways to elude his ghosts while impersonating them ad nauseam, but this collection is a bit too facile.

Real Gone (Anti, 2004) is a spartan album (dominated by Marc Ribot's guitar) that falls below his standards. The spoken-word monologues and the ballads don't quite work. The stylistic experiments (Top Of The Hill, Hoist That Rag) sound transitional at best. Metropolitan Glide, Trampled Rose and the 10-minute blues dirge Sins Of The Father form the core of the collection: the accompaniment is adequate, but the piano is sorely missed.

Ostensibly a collection of rarities, the triple-CD 56-song Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (Anti, 2007) comes with a 94-page book and includes what Waits claim to be 30 new recordings (although some of those titles already appeared elsewhere) (and some are simply retitled old songs, such as Walk Away which is Get Behind the Mule). The three discs roughly correspond to blues-rockers, ballads and dirges. They also contain some really boring covers. This labyrinthine project is for completists only.

Bad As Me (Anti, 2011), Waits' first studio album in seven years, featured distinguished guitarists like Keith Richards (Rolling Stones), David Hidalgo (Los Lobos) and Marc Ribot, bassists Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers) and Les Claypool (Primus). Gino Robair on percussions, Patrick Warren on keyboards, and many other reed and string instrumentalists.
Chicago could have ranked as one of Waits' greatest intuitions if he had not limited it to two minutes: it sounds like a minimalist fanfare a` la Michael Nyman performed by a bar band. Another great idea is the psychobilly Get Lost, imbued of the feverish spirit of bluesman Slim Harpo. The apocalyptic singalong Pay Me boasts the rare soaring refrain at martial waltzing pace, something that one would expect from Leonard Cohen.
Talking At The Same Time, on the other hand, is quintessential Waits-ian nonchalance and angst, with dreamy guitar and nocturnal marching band, but also gloomy Doors-ian overtones. Several of these songs in the old vein sound half-baked and, needless to say, dejavu. The funereal fresco of Face To The Highway concocts a fatalistic feeling thanks to the subdued interplay of violin, organ and guitar. There is, unfortunately, a very weak central section, from which only the whispered mariachi lullaby Back In The Crowd can be saved. Satisfied is a cute skit, with Waits mimicking a rhythm'n'blues shouter of the 1950s like Howling Wolf and arguing about the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction while Keith Richards is providing the guitar counterpoint; but hardly essential. The country lament Last Leaf and the heavily percussive anti-war rap Hell Broke Luce are even more unusual, and the movie, oops i meant "the album", ends with the universal singalong of New Year's Eve, again set (tenderly) to a mariachi rhythm.
The orchestration is impeccable, thanks to the plethora of virtuoso players. The range is broader than usual. Waits' voice is less emotional and less powerful.

Waits also published the poem/chapbook "Seeds on Hard Ground" (2011).

Waits continued to act in movies but mostly lived a reclusive life on his farm in north of San Francisco with his wife Kathleen Brennan and their children.

After a long hiatus, Waits returned with Boots on the Ground (2026), a collaboration with Massive Attack.