Tom Waits

Latest Release

Essential Albums

  • Bone Machine (2023 Remaster)
    Bone Machine (2023 Remaster)
    Bone Machine (2023 Remaster)

    The 11th album from Tom Waits, 1992’s Bone Machine, was his first to arrive in the wake of the new “alternative rock” landscape carved out by the likes of Nirvana’s Nevermind, U2’s Achtung Baby and R.E.M.’s Out of Time. A consummate record-industry outsider for 20 years, Waits had a long discography of uncompromising sounds, experimental urges and lyrical misery. But whether by accident or design, Bone Machine would end up as the most abrasive, cacophonous album of his career, clanging with errant percussion and sandpaper-throated howling about existential dread, death and the apocalypse. Yet this was the early ’90s, a time when even the most out-there artist could find some space in the mainstream (which partly explains how Bone Machine wound up winning a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album). Recorded in a cavernous, un-soundproofed former cement hatchery in California, Bone Machine found Waits cobbling together a scrap heap of percussion, resulting in an album full of rust and decay. “In the Colosseum” features Waits playing the “conundrum”, his bespoke percussion collection that he whacks with a hammer, and that he once described as being akin to “hitting a dumpster”. Meanwhile, “Earth Died Screaming” finds Waits and a handful of co-conspirators trying to capture the sound of Smithsonian field recordings by banging two-by-fours against stones or wood. And “Such a Scream” features characteristically booming drums from future Guns N’ Roses drummer Brian “Brain” Mantia. Between the chaos, Waits provides some of his most tender ballads, like the tragic “A Little Rain”, inspired by a news story about a 15-year-old girl who accepted a ride in a stranger’s van. There’s also the sorrowful “Whistle Down the Wind”—which features keening violin and accordion from Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo—and “That Feel”, a highlight of Waits’ years-long bromance with Keith Richards, as the two duet on a wistful ode to the ephemeral. There’s also the tune “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”, which received some attention from MTV—thanks in part to its Jim Jarmusch-directed video—but it wouldn’t break out until a few years later, when the Ramones turned the song into a pop-punk protest. It wasn’t the only Bone Machine track to enjoy a long pop-culture legacy: The twangy Hollywood fantasy “Goin’ Out West”—described by Waits as “just one of those ‘three chords and real loud’ things”—would be immortalised as the song playing right before Brad Pitt’s character explains the rules of Fight Club. Somehow, the harshest, strangest album of Waits’ career would be one of his most impactful.

  • Small Change (Remastered)
    Small Change (Remastered)
    Small Change (Remastered)

    The album that marked Tom Waits’ quantum leap as a songwriter—1976’s Small Change—coincided with the rusty-throated storyteller’s descent into alcoholism: Life as a touring musician had given Waits no shortage of the kinds of late nights, booze and lonely hotel rooms he’d always sung about. Indeed, his fourth album has a unique bleakness: It’s a collection of bleary-eyed bawlers, narrated by lost men holding up lamp posts or dreaming of New Orleans. Recorded in five nights with no overdubs, the beautifully weather-beaten Small Change ended up as the singer’s breakthrough moment, becoming his first album to make a dent in the Billboard charts. The opening track, “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)”, remains one of Waits’ most enduring songs, dripping with melancholy, regrets and a dusting of strings. Reportedly inspired by Waits’ time wandering Los Angeles’ Skid Row with whisky in a bag, “Traubert” is a textbook example of Waits’ evocative storytelling (“And it’s a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace, and a wound that will never heal/No prima donna, the perfume is on an old shirt that is stained with blood and whisky”). Waits was already widely respected by his singer-songwriter peers by the time Small Change was released, but “Tom Traubert’s Blues” established him as a once-in-a-generation talent (decades later, the song would be turned into a worldwide smash hit for Rod Stewart). Waits has always been an anachronistic figure; even in his twenties, he was name-dropping actresses from the golden age of cinema, and letting his piano wander into Casablanca’s “As Time Goes By”. And indeed, much of Small Change sounds like it could have emerged from a jazz club in an early film noir. Tracks like “The One That Got Away” and “Step Right Up” feature walking bass, salty sax and an atmosphere of hopelessness and doom. Meanwhile, “Small Change (Got Rained on With His Own .38)”—which features nothing more than Waits’ gravelly voice and the moonlit sax of Lew Tabackin—plays like a Mickey Spillane novel in miniature. And “Pasties and a G-String” is pure neon-soaked, zooba-zabbaing sleaze. But no track best encapsulates the boozy joys of Small Change like the closing-time anthem “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King)”, on which Waits sounds absolutely sloshed—he even plays some bum notes on the piano. It’s a standout on an album that finds a masterfully constructed character singing stories of masterfully constructed characters. Small Change is 1970s Waits at his heartbroken-barfly best.

  • Closing Time (Remastered)
    Closing Time (Remastered)
    Closing Time (Remastered)

    The 1973 debut from Tom Waits introduced one of rock music’s greatest storytellers, a 23-year-old Californian who dripped with the nostalgia and whisky-aged melancholy of a man three times his age. Though never a commercial hit, the songs on Closing Time spent the 1970s as a jumping-off point for covers by the Eagles (“Ol’ ’55”) and Tim Buckley (“Martha”). Still, none of those versions can top Waits’ deeply sentimental performances, performed with a sandpaper rasp that sounded like a smoking engine—especially when compared to commercial contemporaries like Jim Croce and Jackson Browne. Weaned on Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac and The Twilight Zone, Waits was discovered lurking around Los Angeles-area open-mic nights by David Geffen, who signed Waits to Asylum Records, the nascent label that was already home to such acts as the Eagles, Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill. Waits quickly got to work on Closing Time, a street-light symphony that makes Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours seem like a party record. Wandering between the piano bar and a folk café, Waits spins tales of loneliness and late nights awash in beer, cigarettes, lazy old tomcats and Greyhounds headed out of town. The opening track, “Ol’ ’55”, was written after Waits heard a story about a guy who rushed a date home before curfew time by driving the Pasadena freeway in reverse. In another artist’s hands, that tale would have been little more than a funny anecdote, but Waits uses it to paint a vivid portrait of young love and yearning. Elsewhere on Closing Time, the indelible “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You” speaks to the kind of bleary-eyed, spotted-from-across-the-bar love that occurs almost entirely in the narrator’s mind, while “Martha” is a pure weeper about a lost love returning after decades: “Operator, number please, it’s been so many years/Will she remember my old voice while I fight the tears?” (Bette Midler would eventually perform “Martha” on Saturday Night Live.) And while the album includes everything from rollicking soul (“Ice Cream Man”) to steel-guitar ballads (“Rosie”) to country waltzes (“Old Shoes (& Picture Postcards)”), the 12 tracks on Closing Time are undeniably “Tom Waits songs”, each imbued with his unmistakable voice and atmosphere. Like all of Waits’ 1970s material, Closing Time was more of a cult object than a commercial breakthrough. But as the decades passed, the album established itself as a one-man standards collection, its evocative songs covered by a remarkably disparate group of artists, including Jon Bon Jovi, Meat Loaf, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 10,000 Maniacs, Hootie & the Blowfish, Sarah McLachlan, Bat for Lashes—and countless more. As Waits once remarked about “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You”: “You take all the bar songs in the world and put ’em together, they’d stretch all the way to Kansas City, I guess—millions of them. This is just another one.” He was right to some extent. But the march of time—and the increasing affection for Closing Time—would also prove him very wrong.

Music Videos

Artist Playlists

Singles & EPs

Live Albums

Compilations

Appears On

More To Hear

About Tom Waits

Tom Waits went from quintessential cult artist to national treasure over the course of a long career full of wildly innovative left turns. His evolutionary process rivals that of The Beatles for artistic distance travelled. Born December 7, 1949 in California, Waits started out in the early ’70s as a piano-based balladeer somewhat in sync with the era’s singer/songwriter scene but differentiated by his raspy tones, the jazzy tinge to his tunes and a persona with a beatnik/film-noir vibe. His first few albums achieved no commercial traction, though the Eagles’ cover of his 1973 track “Ol’ 55” boosted his bank account and profile. Waits’ increasingly quirky sound started gaining attention with 1976’s Small Change, but a major sea change came with his early-’80s move from Asylum Records to Island. On a game-changing trio of albums, Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Frank’s Wild Years, Waits combined a dizzying array of influences, including Brecht/Weill, Harry Partch, Ennio Morricone, brass-band music and more, twisting it all into an unprecedented amalgam and employing a similarly sui generis compositional style to match. Critics were gobsmacked, and his audience grew. Along the way, mainstream covers of his tunes by Bruce Springsteen (“Jersey Girl”) and Rod Stewart (“Downtown Train”) helped advance his cause. In the ’90s, Waits’ sound grew deeper and darker on albums like Bone Machine and Mule Variations, his audience still expanding. In the 21st century, his output slowed but intensified, and his legend grew until he was ultimately celebrated as a true genius of American music.

BORN
1949
GENRE
Alternative

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada
  翻译：