Tom Waits

American songwriter Tom Waits merges swampy blues, Beat poetry, West Coast jazz, Tin Pan Alley, country, 1930s-era cabaret, and post-Civil War parlor songs with neon-lit carnival music and wheezing, clattering experimental rhythms often generated by makeshift musical instruments, thereby shaping a distinctly personal musical realm. Imitators have frequently tried yet never succeeded in duplicating this vision. From the 1970s onward Waits progressed from appearances in fleabag dive bars to performances in opera theaters and prestigious concert halls worldwide. His recordings, ranging from early masterworks such as Small Change and Blue Valentine through the twisted, dramatic, and darkly humorous art songs of the trilogy Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Frank's Wild Years to the deconstructed experimental soundworlds constructed for Bone Machine and Mule Variations, elevated the lives of humble, forgotten, evil, demented, abandoned, cursed, and plain down-on-their-luck figures to honored status in a manner reminiscent of the photographs of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. He forged an iconoclastic route through Stephen Foster and George Gershwin, Howlin' Wolf, and Captain Beefheart as well as Beat Generation writers together with Charles Bukowski, Nelson Algren, and Mark Twain, ultimately assembling a cohesive body of work that appeals across generations and dissolves pop's conventional borders. Waits earned two Grammys and joined the 2011 class of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He appears on Rolling Stone's 2010 list of 100 Greatest Singers and its 2015 list of 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.

Beyond recording he composed for films and musicals while acting in supporting roles that encompass Paradise Alley, Rumblefish, The Cotton Club, The Outsiders, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Additional appearances include several films by director Jim Jarmusch, among them a starring turn in 1986's Down by Law. Waits received an Academy Award nomination for his score and soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart.

During his upbringing in San Diego in the 1950s and early 1960s, Waits absorbed a wealth of American song forms that spanned show tunes, crooners, blues, and hillbilly music while falling under the influence of Border Radio's golden era and encountering mariachi, banda, swing, jump blues, R&B, honky tonk, folk, and early rock & roll. Immersed in music and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, he taught himself piano and guitar as a teenager and started performing on San Diego's expanding folk scene. He also began crafting original songs drawn from fragments of overheard dialogue. Departing home as an adolescent, Waits traveled to Los Angeles, where he resided in his car and worked as a doorman at the L.A. nightclub The Heritage. His performing opportunity arrived in 1969 at the Troubadour, where he openly drew from jazz comedian Lord Buckley's stage persona; he later obtained songwriting assignments before securing a recording contract with Asylum Records. After moving into the notorious Tropicana Motor Hotel, he formed quick friendships with fellow aspiring artists and nighttime street figures including Chuck E. Weiss and Rickie Lee Jones, then recorded and issued his Jerry Yester-produced debut album Closing Time in 1973. The album contained the track "Ol' '55," which the Eagles covered on On the Border; the song eventually generated steady income after the album achieved multi-platinum status. In those initial years Waits performed wherever gigs were available, opening for artists such as Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention and headlining seedy bars and long-abandoned jazz clubs nationwide. In 1974 he released The Heart of Saturday Night, produced by Bones Howe. Less folky and countrified than its predecessor, the album earned favorable critical notices, sold respectably, and entered the lower reaches of the Top 200 chart. Its title track later became a regional hit for Jerry Jeff Walker.

Road experience transformed Waits's live shows into freewheeling encounters in which he not only performed but also recounted wryly humorous, occasionally outrageous or bawdy stories that mythologized his persona while sketching characters such as strippers, circus freaks, barflies, and other streetwise ne'er-do-wells. These performances were documented on the 1975 double-length classic Nighthawks at the Diner, featuring an all-jazz band that included drummer Jim Hughart, pianist Michael Melvoin, and saxophonist Pete Christlieb. Waits continued in a rangy jazz vein for 1976's Small Change (number 89), a more melancholy and lush effort that introduced early traces of the raw bluesy approach heard on later releases. With his rhythm section again featuring Hughart alongside West Coast jazz icon Shelly Manne on drums, Waits and Howe supplemented the songwriter's affinity for ballads by adding a string section. Several tracks, among them "Tom Traubert's Blues" (aka "Waltzing Matilda") and "Step Right Up," remained setlist staples for decades. He maintained jazz and low-key swing-blues on 1977's Foreign Affairs, whose most recognized cut was a duet with Bette Midler on "I Never Talk to Strangers," which reached number 111 on the Top 200. While touring larger venues Waits pursued a more sinister tone and introduced electric guitar for the first time on 1978's brooding, menacing Blue Valentine, which surprised listeners accustomed to his earlier relaxed manner. In 1980 he issued Heartattack and Vine. Its electric blues and R&B orientation carried the album into the upper half of the Top 200, marking his strongest-selling full-length since Small Change. The collection also featured the song "Jersey Girl," later covered by Bruce Springsteen. This proved to be his final Asylum recording.

Waits moved to Chris Blackwell's Island Records for 1983's Swordfishtrombones. Frustrated by the constraints of conventional instrumentation he had previously employed, he found his new label supportive of greater liberty. He advanced his "junkyard orchestral deviation" approach through the use of marimbas, trashcan lids, kettle drums, and tympani along with bleating trombones and muted trumpets. Although the sonic departure proved radical and initial sales modest (number 183 on the Top 200), the album later gained recognition as one of his most respected works. Prior to its release Waits and Crystal Gayle had been collaborating on music and appearances for One from the Heart; on set he met actress and writer Kathleen Brennan. They fell in love and married in 1980. She became his steadfast collaborator and co-writer. The iconic Rain Dogs appeared in 1985 as Waits advanced further into experimental territory, placing his now-ubiquitous megaphone, car radios, and scrap-metal percussion instruments on equal footing with keyboards, electric guitars, and drums while supplying several more accessible songs including "Downtown Train," later covered to hit status by Rod Stewart after he borrowed the concept from a conversation with Bob Seger, who subsequently recorded "Blind Love." Waits's compositions have since supplied material for Marianne Faithfull, Dion, and others. His rising profile enabled him to enlist all-star sidemen such as guitarists Marc Ribot, Chris Spedding, and Keith Richards, bassists Larry Taylor and Greg Cohen, percussionists Michael Blair and Bobby Previte, and saxophonist Ralph Carney. In addition to the expanded percussion arsenal, Waits began employing a pump organ more prominently, as heard on the Brennan song "Hang Down Your Head." Despite its relative accessibility and return to formal song structures, the album peaked at number 185.

Frank's Wild Years achieved stronger chart performance. Issued in 1987 as Waits's ninth album and subtitled "Un Operachi Romantico in Two Acts," the project saw Waits and Brennan co-write most of the songs for a play of the same name that had premiered the previous year with the two principals and Steppenwolf Theatre Company. The album reached number 115 on the album charts. Waits undertook a tour captured on the album Big Time, after which his fortunes stabilized. The trilogy's experimentation had drawn post-punk and indie rock listeners. He extended his boundaries further with the rattling, clattering Bone Machine in 1992, earning his first Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album despite the record's modest Top 200 placement. The year proved significant: Waits appeared on saxophonist Teddy Edwards's Mississippi Lad and released his score for Jarmusch's Night on Earth. He and Brennan then joined writer William S. Burroughs and director Robert Wilson for The Black Rider, a thematically unified series of vanguard cabaret songs deeply shaped by 1930s Weimar-era Berlin. Notwithstanding critical reservations regarding its unrelenting bleakness and noisy textures, the album reached number 130.

Waits delivered a poignant guest vocal on British composer Gavin Bryars's Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, a left-field U.K. hit in 1994. The song appeared in two versions; the second was Bryars's orchestration of a found field recording of a homeless man in London. Having secured the artistic latitude he desired at Island, Waits also sought greater independence in business matters. He therefore signed with indie label Epitaph/Anti in 1999 and released the now-classic Mule Variations. It sold more strongly than any prior release and reached number 24 on the Top 200. Following his first international tour in over a decade, he captured another Grammy, this time for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Around the same period Waits and Brennan collaborated with Wilson once more on a Czech adaptation of Woyzeck. The Waits/Brennan/Wilson team subsequently produced two further theater pieces, Blood Money and Alice (drawn from Alice in Wonderland), both reflecting a more introspective facet of Waits's music-making through their abundance of ballads. Waits recorded both scores and issued them on the same day in 2002. Critical responses varied, yet fans responded warmly; the albums reached numbers 32 and 33 respectively on the album charts that week.

While Waits accepted select engagements and commissions from around the globe, he and Brennan spent the better part of four years in their home studio developing Real Gone. Released in 2006, the album featured a smaller ensemble of familiar contributors including Les Claypool, Taylor, Ribot, and son Casey Waits on drums and percussion. The set sold well and peaked at number 28 on the Top 200. Two years later Waits issued the limited-edition three-disc collection Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards. Comprising 26 rare and 30 previously unissued songs, Waits described it as follows: "Some are from films, some from compilations. Some is stuff that didn't fit on a record, things I recorded in the garage with kids. Oddball things, orphaned tunes." Universal acclaim greeted the sprawling set; it reached number 74 and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Waits and Brennan subsequently toured the United States, Canada, and Europe. In 2009 the live document Glitter and Doom appeared and climbed to number 63. Two years later Waits released Bad as Me, his first collection of entirely new original material since Orphans. It became his highest-charting album, reaching number six on the Top 200 and earning widespread critical recognition as one of the year's finest releases. Bad as Me also received a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album.

Over the ensuing years Waits remastered and reissued his first six Elektra/Asylum albums—Closing Time, The Heart of Saturday Night, Nighthawks at the Diner, Small Change, Foreign Affairs, Blue Valentine, and Heart Attack and Vine—while also re-releasing the three individual volumes of Orphans (Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards). He additionally resumed acting in David Lowery's feature film The Old Man and the Gun, co-starring with Robert Redford (in his final picture), Sissy Spacek, and Danny Glover. In 2018 Waits appeared among several guest vocalists on Ribot's political album Songs of Resistance 1942-1918 (alongside Steve Earle, Meshell Ndegeocello, Justin Vivian Bond, and others), which supported The Indivisible Project, an organization assisting individuals in resisting Donald Trump's agenda through local grassroots efforts.