Tom Waits Career Retrospective

Tom Waits’s career divides cleanly into two halves, and the division is one of the most dramatic reinventions in popular music history. The first half, spanning roughly 1973 to 1982, produced records of bourbon-soaked jazz balladry sung in a gravelly but conventional voice — a beatnik troubadour playing piano in smoky bars. The second half, beginning with Swordfishtrombones in 1983 and continuing to the present, abandoned that persona entirely in favor of an experimental, junkyard-percussion, Captain-Beefheart-influenced sound that is among the most distinctive and uncompromising in American music.

Both halves produced extraordinary music. The transformation between them is a case study in artistic courage.

The Asylum Years: 1973-1982

Waits signed to Asylum Records at twenty-three and released his debut, Closing Time (1973), a quiet album of folk-tinged ballads and piano pieces that reveals a mature songwriter already working at a high level. “Ol’ 55” (later covered by the Eagles) and “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You” are beautiful, straightforward songs that give little indication of what was coming.

The next several albums — The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), Nighthawks at the Diner (1975), Small Change (1976), and Foreign Affairs (1977) — developed a persona: the late-night barroom storyteller, narrating tales of drunks, strippers, drifters, and lost souls in a voice that grew progressively rougher with each album. The musical backing was jazz — upright bass, piano, saxophone, brushed drums — and the delivery owed as much to Beat poetry and spoken word as to conventional singing.

Small Change is the peak of this period. “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)” is one of the great American ballads, a seven-minute meditation on despair set to a melody borrowed from “Waltzing Matilda.” The arrangement — just piano, strings, and Waits’s voice — is devastatingly simple. “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)” showcases the darkly comic side of the persona.

Heartattack and Vine (1980) hinted at the transformation to come, incorporating electric guitar and a rawer, more aggressive sound. But the full break did not come until Waits left Asylum Records and his marriage to Kathleen Brennan — who became his permanent creative collaborator — catalyzed a complete rethinking of his musical approach.

Swordfishtrombones and the Reinvention

Swordfishtrombones (1983) is one of the most startling left turns in recorded music. The jazz instrumentation is gone. In its place: marimba, pump organ, bagpipes, banjo, accordion, found percussion (Waits banging on metal objects), and a production approach influenced by Harry Partch’s microtonal instruments and Captain Beefheart’s rhythmic dislocations.

Waits’s voice, always raspy, now became an instrument of extreme and varied characterization — he could bellow, whisper, growl, croon, or speak in a dozen different voices within a single album. The songs abandoned the confessional barroom narratives in favor of surrealist storytelling populated by soldiers, sailors, circus freaks, and inhabitants of an imaginary American underworld.

The production, handled by Waits himself, favors proximity and roughness. Instruments sound close-miked and unprocessed. Percussion is often literal junk — oil drums, chair legs, hubcaps. The overall effect is of music made in a workshop rather than a studio.

Rain Dogs (1985) expanded the palette further, adding guitarist Marc Ribot, whose angular, dissonant style — owing equal debts to jazz, blues, and Cuban music — became a defining element of Waits’s sound. The album ranges from the lurching, Beefheart-influenced “Singapore” to the tender waltz “Time” to the New Orleans funeral march “Tango Till They’re Sore.” Keith Richards plays guitar on several tracks, and the album’s stylistic breadth — polka, blues, tango, march, ballad, noise — is staggering.

Franks Wild Years (1987) completed the trilogy that Swordfishtrombones began, conceived as the soundtrack to a stage production Waits and Brennan developed for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. The album is more theatrical and less immediately accessible than its predecessors, but tracks like “Innocent When You Dream” and “Yesterday Is Here” are among his most beautiful compositions.

The Island Years and Beyond

Bone Machine (1992) won a Grammy and remains Waits’s most unrelentingly harsh record. Recorded using minimal equipment in a concrete storage room, it strips the sound to its most primal elements — bass, distorted guitar, pounded percussion, and Waits’s voice at its most extreme. “Earth Died Screaming” and “Dirt in the Ground” are apocalyptic. “Who Are You” is terrifying. The album sounds like music excavated from underground.

Mule Variations (1999), Waits’s return after a seven-year absence, is his most accessible later-period album and perhaps the best entry point for new listeners. It balances the experimental impulse with songs of genuine melodic beauty — “Hold On,” “Picture in a Frame,” “House Where Nobody Lives” — while maintaining the junkyard aesthetic. The album also features “What’s He Building?”, a spoken-word piece of escalating paranoia that is Waits at his most theatrically effective.

Blood Money (2002) and Alice (2002), released simultaneously, are both derived from theatrical collaborations with Robert Wilson. Blood Money, based on Georg Buchner’s play Woyzeck, is dark and percussive. Alice, inspired by Lewis Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell, is surprisingly gentle and melodic — a reminder that Waits’s balladry never disappeared, it simply became stranger.

Real Gone (2004) is Waits’s most rhythmically aggressive album, built on turntablism, beatboxing, and heavily processed percussion. The absence of piano — Waits’s original instrument — is conspicuous and deliberate.

Bad as Me (2011), his most recent studio album, is a concise, energetic record that synthesizes the various phases of his career into a unified statement. Keith Richards returns, Marc Ribot is present throughout, and the songs range from the ferocious “Raised Right Men” to the tender “Last Leaf.”

The Waits Sound

Several elements define the mature Tom Waits sound. Marc Ribot’s guitar — angular, spidery, alternating between near-silence and jagged outbursts — is present on most post-1985 recordings. Larry Taylor’s upright bass provides a warm, woody foundation. The percussion, whether played by Waits himself or by collaborators, favors found objects and unconventional instruments over standard drum kits.

Kathleen Brennan’s role as co-writer and creative director cannot be overstated. Waits credits her influence as the catalyst for his reinvention, and their collaborative process — she is reportedly the more experimental of the two — has produced the entirety of his most acclaimed work.

Where to Start

New listeners should begin with Mule Variations for the best balance of accessibility and experimentation. Then move backward to Rain Dogs for the peak of the experimental period, and to Small Change for the best of the early barroom years. Swordfishtrombones is essential for understanding the transformation. Bone Machine is for listeners who want the extreme end.

Waits connects to the broader tradition of American roots experimentalism explored through our coverage of [INTERNAL: velvet-underground-and-nico-review] and to the theatrical intensity discussed in our [INTERNAL: nick-cave-career-retrospective]. His jazz roots link to the tradition surveyed in our [INTERNAL: kind-of-blue-miles-davis-review].