The first album of the loose trilogy that also includes Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years, Swordfishtrombones marked a radical departure for Waits, whose avant-garde ambitions became plain not so much in his lyrics or subject matter--the songs here deal, as do his older albums, with hard life on the wrong side of the tracks and dreams of escape and transcendence--but in the music, a sound somewhere between German cabaret music from between the wars and contemporary Manhattan rush hour. Odd time signatures, unusual instrumentation (glass harmonicas and brake drums, among others), and Waits's barked vocals make this one of his most individualistic and challenging albums. --Daniel Durchholz

The grizzled modern persona of Tom Waits finds new life on Alice, a slow, grave record that explores physical and moral decay with the same harrowing insight of 1992's Bone Machine. Originally written as an opera with his longtime songwriting partner, playwright Kathleen Brennan, the songs on Alice were performed live in a Hamburg theater for 18 months in 1992 and 1993, but were never committed to tape (officially, at least). This studio recording retains a sense of narrative cohesion, giving Waits a set of tormented and bizarre characters that go well with the motley crew he's assembled over the years. It is, in fact, the most consistent record of Waits's career, offering not only a stable train of thought, but a musical approach that, while featuring the same vaudevillian touches that have characterized his work since Swordfishtrombones, finds a voice all its own. Without much percussion to back them up, violins, cellos, and horns dominate the record, bathing Waits's familiar growl in a sly, slow cacophony that sounds like an underwater fugue, the notes like rust on the strings. "Watch Her Disappear," with its sparse, sad pump organ, and the twisted torch song "Reeperbahn" have the smoky café mystery of Edith Piaf by way of Leonard Cohen, recovered from the water-logged tapes in Cole Porter's long-lost dingy. It's a burst of dark, world-weary poetry for lonely Saturday nights, cloudy days on the beach, or long strolls through graveyards. --Matthew Cooke

When I was small I always thought that songwriters sat alone at upright pianos in cramped smoky little rooms with a bottle and an ashtray and everything came in the window blew through them and came out of the piano as a song…and in a weird way that is exactly what happens.
What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.
At the center of this record is my voice. I try my best to chug, stomp, weep, whisper, moan, wheeze, scat, blurt, rage, whine, and seduce. With my voice, I can sound like a girl, the boogieman, a Theremin, a cherry bomb, a clown, a doctor, a murderer…I can be tribal. Ironic. Or disturbed. My voice is really my instrument.
Kathleen and I wanted the record to be like emptying our pockets on the table after an evening of gambling, burglary, and cow tipping. We enjoy strange couplings, that’s how we got together. We wanted Orphans to be like a shortwave radio show where the past is sequenced with the future, consisting of things you find on the ground, in this world and no world, or maybe the next world. Whatever you imagine that to be.
If a record really works at all, it should be made like a homemade doll with tinsel for hair and seashells for ears stuffed with candy and money. Or like a good woman’s purse with a Swiss army knife and a snake bite kit.
Orphans contains songs for all occasions. Some of the songs were written in turmoil and recorded at night in a moving car, others were written in hotel rooms and recorded in Hollywood during big conflamas. That’s when conflict weds drama. At any rate these are the ones that survived the flood and were rescued from the branches of trees after the water’s retreat.
Gathering all this material together was like rounding up chickens at the beach. It’s not like you go into vault and check out what you need. Most of it was lost or buried under the house. Some of the tapes I had to pay ransom for to a plumber in Russia. You fall into the vat. We started to write just to climb out of the vat. Then you start listening and sorting and start writing in response to what you hear. And more recording. And then you get bit by a spider, go down the gopher hole, and make a whole different record. That was the process pretty much the last three years.
Then we met Karl Derfler, a wizard engineer who works at Bay Side Studios in Richmond, CA, in the science fiction part of town. A battlefield medic, he did a Lazarus on a number of the songs and recorded all the new material.
On Orphans there is a mambo about a convict who breaks out of jail with a fishbone, a gospel train song about Charlie Whitman and John Wilkes Boothe, a delta blues about a disturbing neighbor, a spoken word piece about a woman who was struck by lightening, an 18th century Scottish madrigal about murderous sibling rivalry, an American backwoods a cappella about a hanging. Even a song by Jack Kerouac and a spiritual with my own personal petition to the Lord with prayer…There’s even a show tune about an old altar boy and a rockabilly song about a young man who’s begging to be lied to.
I think you will find more singing and dancing here than usual. But I hope fans of more growling, more warbling, more barking, more screeching won’t be disappointed either.
Tom Waits
August 2006

The middle album of the trilogy that includes Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years, Rain Dogs is Waits's best overall effort. The songs are first-rate, and there are a lot of them--19 in all, ranging from grim nightlife memoirs ("9th and Hennepin," "Singapore") to portraits of small-time hustlers ("Gun Street Girl," "Union Square") to bursts of street-corner philosophy ("Blind Love," "Time"). The album also contains the original version of "Downtown Train," which Rod Stewart turned into a smash hit. The image of "rain dogs"--animals who've lost their way home because the rain has washed away their scent--is an appropriate symbol for the entire cast of characters Waits has brought to life over the years, and this album has thus far proved to be his most enduring effort. --Daniel Durchholz

It starts with a sunrise, it ends with "one star shining," and in between Closing Time contains an honest year's worth (1973, to be exact) of sweet, melodic, vintage Tom Waits--minus some of the vocal growl and thematic grit of his later stuff (but you can see it coming). Waltzes, lullabies, blues, jazz, you name it. Driving songs and drinking songs, even an honest to gosh country tune: "Rosie." There are torchers ("Lonely"), scorchers ("Ice Cream Man"), and back-porch senior citizen love songs ("Martha"): "Those were the days of roses/Poetry and prose, and/Martha, all I had was you and all you had was me." Other standouts are "I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You" (guess what--he does!) and "Grapefruit Moon," in which Waits croons: "Every time I hear that melody, something breaks inside." Hang on to your hearts and hats, folks. --Dan Leone