Table of Content
That year, he also appeared in the Kinka Usher film Mystery Men, a comic book spoof, where he played Dr A. Heller, an eccentric inventor living in an abandoned amusement park. In 2000, Waits produced Wicked Grin, the 2001 album of his friend John Hammond; the album contained several covers of Waits songs. Waits next appeared in Jarmusch's film Coffee and Cigarettes, where he was filmed having a conversation with the rock singer Iggy Pop.
Alices songs are a school of fish that lead the listener into the rapture of the deep. Blood Moneys songs are musical dispatches from the dark, human carnival of life, said Waits, explaining how the two albums differed. Following the release of The Black Rider in 1993, there was to be a six-year hiatus before the next Tom Waits album. In those intervening years, however, he devoted himself to an array of different musical projects.
Tom Waits
He decided to reduce his workload so as to spend more time with his children; this isolation spawned rumours that he was seriously ill or had separated from his wife. For three years, he turned down all offers to perform gigs or appear in movies. However, he made several cameos and guest appearances on albums by musicians he admired. The English musician Gavin Bryars visited him in California and Waits added vocals for a re-release of Bryars's Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which was then nominated for the 1993 Mercury Music Award. In Fall 1986, he took a small part in Candy Mountain, a film by Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer, as millionaire golf enthusiast Al Silk. He then starred in Hector Babenco's Ironweed, as Rudy the Kraut, a more substantial role.
Waits was grateful, both for the revenue that the cover brought him and because he felt appreciated by a songwriter whom he admired. He followed this with a week's residency at the Reno Sweeney nightclub, an off-Broadway–style club in New York City. From March to May 1976, he toured the U.S., telling interviewers that the experience was tough and that he was drinking too much alcohol. In May, he embarked on his first tour of Europe, performing in London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Copenhagen.
The Black Rider, Bone Machine, and Alice: 1989–1998
In 1980, Waits married Kathleen Brennan, split from his manager and record label, and moved to New York City. With Brennan's encouragement and frequent collaboration, he pursued a more experimental and eclectic musical aesthetic influenced by the work of Harry Partch and Captain Beefheart. This was reflected in a series of albums released by Island Records, including Swordfishtrombones , Rain Dogs , and Franks Wild Years . He continued appearing in films, notably starring in Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law , and also made theatrical appearances.
In between this film work, Waits also recorded a vocal for Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet, the English composer Gavin Bryars remarkable 75-minute orchestral essay. The work centred on a 1971 field recording of a London hobo singing a religious tune; on Bryars album, Waits duets along with the voice of the tramp. His soundtrack featuring duets with country singer Crystal Gayle - is an enduring classic of American cinema. It was the start of a long association with Coppola, evidenced by Waits appearances as an actor in the directors Rumble Fish, The Outsiders, The Cotton Club and as the unforgettable Renfield in Bram Stokers Dracula. Each of the three CDs is separately grouped and sub-titled Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards to capture the full spectrum of Waits ranging and roving musical styles. Brawlers is chock full of raucous blues and full-throated juke joint stomp; Bawlers comprises Celtic and country ballads, waltzes, lullabies, piano and classic lyrical Waits songs while Bastards is filled with experimental music and strange tales.
Album Discography
Waits found New York City life frustrating, although it allowed him to meet many new musicians and artists. He befriended John Lurie of The Lounge Lizards, and the duo began sharing a music studio in the Westbeth artist-community building in Greenwich Village. He began networking in the city's arts scene, and, at a party Jean-Michel Basquiat held for Lurie, he met the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. In addition to the new work, Orphans features a number of songs originally recorded for the cinema, the theatre and other projects but which now find a home on a Waits album for the first time.
Thomas Alan Waits was born in Pomona, California, to schoolteachers Alma Fern and Jesse Frank Waits. Described as one of the last beatniks of the contemporary music, Waits in fact has two separate careers. From 1973 (LP "Closing Time") to 1983 ("One From The Heart" soundtrack), he recorded nine LPs for Asylum Records, writing songs mainly in the manner of Tin Pan Alley, mixing them with jazz and blues. Extraordinarily, he never produced a hit, but he earned a cult following all over the world. In 1983 he signed with Island Records, and released a series of albums that stunned the music world. Beginning with "Swordfishtrombones", he introduced a whole new orchestration, which included some of the instruments invented by Harry Partch.
Real Gone: 2004–2011
Waits decided that he wanted to record an album of the songs written for The Black Rider play, doing so at Los Angeles' Sunset Sound Factory. Waits and Wilson decided to collaborate again, this time on an operatic treatment about the novelist Lewis Carroll's relationship with Alice Liddell, who had provided the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Again scheduled to premier at the Thalia, they began working on the project in Hamburg in early 1992. Waits characterized the songs he wrote for the play as "adult songs for children, or children's songs for adults". In his lyrics, Waits drew on his increasing interest in freak shows and the physically deformed. He thought the play itself was about "repression, mental illness and obsessive, compulsive disorders".
At the June concert in El Paso, Texas, he was awarded the key to the city. Waits had also continued interacting and working with other artists he admired. He was a great fan of The Pogues and went on a Chicago pub crawl with them in 1986. The following year, he appeared as a master of ceremonies on several dates of Elvis Costello's "Wheel of Fortune" tour.
It was on his 1977 tour for Foreign Affairs that he started employing props as part of his routine; one recurring prop was a megaphone through which he would shout at the audience. In 2012, Waits had a supporting role in the crime comedy film, Seven Psychopaths, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, in which he played a retired serial killer. In September 2003, Waits performed at the Healing the Divide fundraiser in New York City, and contributed a track to that year's release of the album, Tribute to the Ramones. This latter track earned him a Grammy Award nomination for "Best Vocal Rock Performance". By the time he was studying at Hilltop High School, he later related, he was "kind of an amateur juvenile delinquent", interested in "malicious mischief" and breaking the law.
He relocated to Los Angeles in 1972, where he worked as a songwriter before signing a recording contract with Asylum Records. His first albums were the jazz-oriented Closing Time and The Heart of Saturday Night , which reflected his lyrical interest in nightlife, poverty, and criminality. He repeatedly toured the United States, Europe, and Japan, and attracted greater critical recognition and commercial success with Small Change , Blue Valentine , and Heartattack and Vine . He produced the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola's film One from the Heart , and subsequently made cameo appearances in several Coppola films.
While on the set of One from the Heart, Waits met Kathleen Brennan, a young Irish-American woman working as an assistant story editor; Waits later described encountering her as "love at first sight". In August 1980, they married at a 24-hour wedding chapel on Manchester Boulevard in Watts before honeymooning in Tralee, a town in County Kerry, Ireland, where Brennan had family. Returning to Los Angeles, the couple moved into a Union Avenue apartment. Hoskyns noted that with Brennan, "Waits had found the stabilizing, nurturing companion he'd always wanted", and that she brought him "a sense of emotional security he had never known" before. At the same time, many of his old friends felt cut off after his marriage. Tom also contributed a song to the Wim Wenders film, The End of Violence while, in 1998, Waits and Brennan composed the score and a song for Bunny, which won the Oscar for Best Short Film .
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