Tom Waits - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thomas Alan Waits (born , ) is an American , , and . Waits has a distinctive voice, described by one critic as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of , left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car." With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock styles such as , , and , and experimental tendencies verging on , Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona.
Lyrically, Waits' songs are known for atmospheric portrayals of bizarre, seedy characters and places, although he has also shown a penchant for more conventional and touching . He has a and has influenced subsequent songwriters, despite having little radio or music video support. His songs are best known to the general public in the form of by more visible artists—for example " " performed by , "Ol' 55" performed by , " " performed by , and "Temptation" performed by .
Although Waits's albums have met with mixed commercial success in his native United States, they have occasionally achieved sales status in other countries. He has been nominated for a number of major music awards, and has won for two albums.
Waits has also worked as a composer for movies and and as a supporting actor in films, including and .
He has been nominated for an for his soundtrack work.
Tom Waits was born in . His father Frank was of Scottish-Irish descent and his mother of Norwegian descent.
Tom was working as a doorman at the Heritage nightclub in San Diego in the early '70s, where artists of every genre performed. An avid fan of many writers and musicians, among them , , , , , , and , Waits began developing his own idiosyncratic musical style, combining and .
After an interlude with the US Coast Guard he took his newly formed act to Monday nights at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, where musicians from all over stood in line all day to get the opportunity to perform on-stage that night.
Shortly thereafter, in 1971, Waits began his recording career after he relocated to and signed to with , who was also the manager of . He was 21 years old.
After numerous abortive recording sessions, Waits's first record, the melancholic, , -tinged was released (1973).
While it received warm reviews, he did not gain widespread attention until his "Ol' 55" was recorded by his labelmates the in 1974 for their album.
He began touring and opening for such artists as , and . Waits gained increasing critical acclaim and a loyal cult audience with his subsequent albums.
, featuring the loping, classic, prime 1974 bar song, "Looking For the Heart of Saturday Night", which showcases Waits' distinctive, plucked, cowboy-ballad style of acoustic guitar playing, backed by a crying fretless bass and a sweet, weathered, pure vocal. The album revealed Waits's roots as a nightclub singer, with half-spoken and half-crooned ballads, often accompanied with a backup band.
The 1975 album , recorded in a studio with a small audience to capture the ambiance of a live show, captures this phase of his career, including the lengthy spoken interludes between songs that punctuated his live act.
A highlight of this album, "Big Joe and Phantom 309", features his fine acoustic guitar playing. Regarding his music of this era, Waits reported that "I wasn't thrilled by , so I found an alternative, even if it was ."
(1976), featuring famed , was more jazz influenced, and songs such as "The Piano Has Been Drinking" and "Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" cemented Waits's hard-living reputation, with a lyrical style that owed influence to and .
(1977) and (1978) were in a similar vein, but showed further refinement of his artistic voice. The song "Blue Valentines" features a desolate arrangement of solo electric guitar played by Ray Crawford and sung by Waits. It was around this time that Waits had a high-profile romantic relationship with (who appears on the sleeve art of the Foreign Affairs and Blue Valentine albums).
was released in 1980, with a developing sound which included both the balladeer tendencies (for example in "Jersey Girl"), and some rougher-edged -style songs.
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Though not entirely unprecedented,
Heartattack and Vine's grittier sound was different for Waits, and foreshadowed the major changes in his music that would follow several years later. The same year, he began a long working relationship with , who asked Waits to provide music for his film
.
For Coppolla's film, Waits originally wanted to work with Bette Midler, who previously sang a duet with him on the Billie Holiday-esque track "I Never Talk to Strangers" from Foreign Affairs, but due to previous engagements, Midler was unavailble. Instead, Waits ended up working with singer/songwriter as his vocal foil for the album.
In August 1980, Waits married , whom he had met on the set of One from the Heart.
Brennan is regularly credited as co-author of many songs on his later albums, and Waits often cites her as a major influence on his work. She introduced him to the music of : despite having shared a manager with Beefheart in the 1970s, Waits says "I became more acquainted with him when I got married." Waits would later describe his relationship with Brennan as a in his musical development.
After leaving for , Waits released in 1983, a record which marked a sharp turn in Waits's output, and which gave rise to his reputation as a musical maverick. The album advances all the musical experimentation of earlier recordings, including variations in instrumentation (e.g.
the use of bagpipes in "Town with No Cheer" or the marimba on "Shore Leave") and vocalising (e.g. the spoken word monologue of "Frank's Wild Years" or the bark of "16 Shells from a Thirty Ought Six"), and much less of the traditional piano-and-strings ballad sound with which Waits had always previously balanced his recordings.
Apart from and some of 's early output, there was little precedent in popular music for or equally idiosyncratic albums, (1985) and (1987).
Waits had earlier played either or , but he began tiring of these instruments, saying, "Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they've been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places.
You have to break them of their habits or you don't explore, you only play what is confident and pleasing. I'm learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know absolutely nothing about, like a or a ."
The instrumentation and in these and later albums were often quite eclectic.
Waits's self-described "Junkyard Orchestra" included wheezing , clattering percussion (sometimes reminiscent of the music of ), bleary (often featuring playing in the style of or ), nearly guitar (perhaps best typified by 's contributions) and obsolete instruments.
Along with a new instrumental approach, Waits gradually altered his singing style to sound less like the late-night of the 70s, instead adopting a number of techniques: a gravelly sound reminiscent of and , a booming, feral bark, or a strained, nearly shrieking Waits jokingly describes as his voice. Tom Moon describes Waits's voice as a "broad-spectrum ".
His shifted as well, becoming somewhat more abstract and embracing a number of styles largely ignored in , including primal , stylings, , theatrical approaches in the style of , , early and European , as well as the -era songs that influenced his early output. He also recorded a few pieces influenced by 's "word jazz" records of the 1950s.
, and can retrospectively be seen as a of loose , following a sailor as he leaves the familiar comfort of home, sees the world, and returns.
The last of these albums was also adapted as an , which Waits co-wrote with Brennan — and starred in, in a successful run at 's famed . This continued Waits' involvement in other artistic forms; he developed his acting career with several supporting roles, and a lead role in 's in 1986 which also included several of Waits's songs in the soundtrack. Further collaborations would follow, and with his wife Waits also wrote and performed in Big Time, a concert movie and released in .
In 1990 Waits collaborated with photographer . Her book, Sylvia Plachy's Unguided Tour includes a short Tom Waits record to accompany the photographs and text.
Waits appeared on ' 1991 album, as the voice of "Tommy the Cat", which exposed him to a new audience in .
This was the first of several collaborations between Waits and the group; (Primus' singer, songwriter and bassist) would appear on several subsequent Waits releases. Waits wrote and conducted the music for 's film , which was released as an album the following year.
was released in 1992.
The stark record featured a great deal of percussion and guitar (with little piano or sax), marking another change in Waits's sound. Critic calls it "perhaps Tom Waits' most cohesive album ..
. a morbid, sinister nightmare, one that applied the quirks of his experimental '80s classics to stunningly evocative – and often harrowing – effect ..
. Waits' most affecting and powerful recording, even if it isn't his most accessible." Bone Machine was awarded a in the Best Alternative Album category.
(1993) was the result of a theatrical collaboration between Waits, director and writer .
was issued in 1999, and also won a Grammy, though to give an idea of how impossible it is to classify Waits' music, he was nominated simultaneously for Best Contemporary Folk Album (which he won) and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance (for the song "Hold On")–both different from the genre for which he won his previous Grammy. It was Waits's first release for Anti Records, and his first to feature a , though, predictably, the instrument is used in an offbeat manner.
The album was also his highest-charting album in the US, reaching #30.
Singer 's was issued in 2001. Hammond and Waits are close friends, and the album is a collection of , originally written by Waits, who appears on most songs (playing guitar, piano or offering backing vocals).
There is also a version of the traditional hymn "I Know I've Been Changed", which Hammond and Waits perform as a duet.
In 2002, Waits simultaneously released two albums, and . Both were based on theatrical collaborations with Robert Wilson, the former originally intended as a play about and the latter an interpretation of 's play fragment .
The two albums revisit the tango, , and spoken word influences of Swordfishtrombones, while the lyrics are both profoundly cynical and melancholy, as the titles "Misery is the River of the World" and "No One Knows I'm Gone" make clear.
was released in 2004. While more refined than Bone Machine and perhaps more commercially viable than Alice or Blood Money, its sound is still experimental, and it is his only album thus far completely lacking in piano.
Waits on the opening track, "Top of the Hill", and most of the album's songs begin with Waits's "vocal percussion" improvisations. It is also more rock-oriented, with less blues influence than he has previously demonstrated, and it contains two explicitly political songs — a first for Waits. In the album-closing "The Day After Tomorrow" he adopts the of a soldier writing home that he is disillusioned with war and is thankful to be leaving.
The song doesn't mention the , and, as Tom Moon writes, "it could be the voice of a soldier singing a lonesome late-night dirge." Waits himself does describe the song as something of an "elliptical" about the Iraqi invasion, however. describes "The Day After Tomorrow" as "one of the most insightful and understated songs to have been written in decades.
It contains not a hint of banality or sentiment in its folksy articulation."
A 54 song, three-disc box set of rarities, unreleased tracks and brand new compositions called was released in November 2006. An mp3 track from the album is available on the website called "Bottom of the World", as well as a video for the song "Lie to Me".
The already critically acclaimed compilation has been receiving rave reviews from every publication that has reviewed it, with scores, more or less, solely in the 5-star region.
In November 2006 Waits appeared on with and performed "The Day After Tomorrow" from Real Gone, significant for being only the third performing guest on the show, the first being and the second being . While on the show, he said (of his songs being about lowlifes and grisly situations) "it's all an act.
" Waits now lives in with his wife, , and their three children.
Tom Waits albums Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, Alice, and Blood Money are all included in 's list of the "Top 200: Best-Reviewed Albums" since 2000 at #11, #17 and #183 respectively. This demonstrates the high regard in which Tom Waits' recent output is held.
Waits has steadfastly refused to allow the use of his songs in commercials and has joked about other artists who do. ("If wants to work for Pepsi, why doesn't he just get himself a suit and an office in their headquarters and be done with it." ) He has filed several lawsuits against advertisers who used his material without permission.
He has been quoted, "Apparently the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad — ideally naked and purring on the hood of a new car," he said in a statement, referring to 's "Cougar" automobile. "I have adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor."
Waits has often switched to smaller independent record companies over the years: he signed to before they were bought out by and During his time with , that label expanded from a small company to a music industry giant; he then signed to Anti Records, a division of .
Waits's first lawsuit was filed in 1988 against , and resulted in a US$2.6 million judgement in his favor. Frito Lay had approached Waits to use one of his songs in an advertisement.
Waits declined the offer, and Frito Lay hired a Waits soundalike to sing a similar to Small Change's "Step Right Up", which is, , a song Waits has called "an indictment of ." Waits won the lawsuit, becoming the first artist to successfully sue a company for using an impersonator without permission.
In 1993, Levi's used 's version of Waits' "Heartattack and Vine" in a commercial.
Waits sued, and Levi's agreed to cease all use of the song, and offered a full page apology in .
In 2000, Waits found himself in a situation similar to his earlier one with Frito-Lay: Audi approached him, asking to use "Innocent When You Dream" (from Franks Wild Years) for a commercial broadcast in Spain. Waits declined, but the commercial ultimately featured music very similar to that song.
Waits undertook legal action, and a Spanish court recognized that there had been a violation of Waits's moral rights, in addition to the infringement of . The production company, , was ordered to pay compensation to Waits through his Spanish publisher. Waits was later quoted as jokingly saying the company got the name of the song wrong, thinking it was called "Innocent When You Scheme".
In 2005, Waits sued , claiming that, after having failed to sign him to sing in their Scandinavian commercials, they had hired a sound-alike singer. In 2007, the suit was settled, and Waits gave his winnings to charity.
Waits did agree to allow his song, "Way Down in the Hole" to be used as the opening theme for HBO's television series .
The version appearing in season two is from Waits' album, Frank's Wild Years.
Waits has also filed lawsuits in instances unrelated to his music. He was arrested in 1977 outside Duke's Tropicana Coffee Shop in Los Angeles.
Waits and a friend were trying to stop some men from bullying other patrons. The men were plainclothed police and Waits and his friend were taken into custody and charged with disturbing the peace. The jury found Waits not guilty, and he took the police department to court and was awarded $7,500 compensation.
has identified Waits as a member of , a secretive organization founded by Jarmusch and consisting of people who, by appearance at least, could be Lee Marvin's sons. There are numerous references in interviews of Jim and Tom, normally quoted as saying, "Sorry can't talk any more." Washington post-hardcore/progressive rock band have a song named "Tom Waits", in response to Tom Waits' song "The Fall Of Troy". However, The Fall Of Troy is not actually named after the song by Tom Waits.
: Waits performs "What Keeps Mankind Alive?" (from ). Red, Hot and Blue: Waits performs 's "It's All Right With Me". Music video directed by . , by : Waits appears as guest singer. features Waits' song, "Clap Hands". Dead Man Walking: Waits performs original compositions "Fall of Troy" and "Walk Away" for the film's soundtrack. , by Primus: Waits produces, provides vocals, and plays the mellotron on the song "Coattails of a Deadman". Extremely Cool by : Waits appears as a guest vocalist and guitarist. Waits also co-produced the album and executive produced the album with Kathleen Brennan. Beatin' the Heat, by features Waits' original song, "The Piano Has Been Drinkin'". Waits also performs with Hicks on song "I'll Tell Why That is".
Witness by trumpeter : Waits is featured in the 25-minute track "Mahfouz" (named for Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz), reading an excerpt from Mahfouz's work. , by : the recording of Waits reading of his poem; "What's He Building in There" hidden in the disc's pregap. , by features Waits' original song, "Diamond in Your Mind". , , November 21, 2006. , , November 27, 2006. Interview with on , November 28, 2006.
Keywords: Tom Waits, Wild Years, Day After, Frito Lay, After Tomorrow, Day After Tomorrow, When You, Innocent When, Bone Machine, Blood Money
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