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We cannot guarantee the delivery services will do their jobs as they normally do, but we are factoring in an extra day on their side in these estimates. We are shipping as much as possible each day from now until the 23rd, and intend for every order that comes in, even after the 14th to deliver by the 23rd. His father, Jesse Frank Waits, was a Texas native of Scots-Irish descent, while his mother, Alma Fern (née Johnson), hailed from Oregon and had Norwegian ancestry.
According to David Smay, Swordfishtrombones was "the record where Tom Waits radically reinvented himself and reshaped the musical landscape." The album was critically well received; the New Musical Express named it album of the year. Waits was dissatisfied with Elektra-Asylum, whom he felt had lost interest in him as an artist in favor of their more commercially successful acts like the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon, and Queen. Jones's musical career was taking off; after an appearance on Saturday Night Live, her single "Chuck E.'s In Love" reached number 4 in the singles chart, straining her relationship with Waits. Waits joined Jones for the first leg of her European tour, but then ended his relationship with her. In September, Waits moved to Crenshaw Boulevard to be closer to his father, before deciding to relocate to New York City. He initially lived in the Chelsea Hotel before renting an apartment on West 26th Street.
The Black Rider, Bone Machine, and Alice: 1989–1998
Hoskyns described the "core sound" of Waits's early work as being that of a "Beat verse/jazz-trio". During his Blue Valentine tour, Waits began experimenting more with sounds derived from the blues, with Humphries arguing that Waits had "always been indebted" to the blues. In later life, he preferred to be thought of as a blues singer, although accepted the label of a folk singer.
With theatre director Robert Wilson, he produced the musicals The Black Rider and Alice , first performed in Hamburg. Having returned to California in the 1990s, his albums Bone Machine , The Black Rider , and Mule Variations earned him increasing critical acclaim and multiple Grammy Awards. In the late 1990s, he switched to the record label ANTI-, which released Blood Money , Alice , Real Gone , and Bad as Me . Waits wrote the songs which would be included on the album Swordfishtrombones during a two-week trip to Ireland.
Swordfishtrombones and New York City: 1980–1984
He also began to sing at the Heritage; his set initially consisted largely of covers of Dylan and Red Sovine's "Big Joe and Phantom 309". In 1986 Waits appeared in Jim Jarmuschs Down by Law, a film that coincidentally marked the international debut of Italian actor Roberto Benigni. That same year Waits made his theatrical stage debut with Franks Wild Years - a musical play he co-wrote with Brennan - at Chicagos Steppenwolf Theatre.
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.
Jazz Pros
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.
In 2004, Waits related that "Wilson is my teacher. There's nobody that's affected me that much as an artist". Waits was scheduled to write the music for the play, and at the suggestion of Allen Ginsberg, Waits and Wilson approached the Beat poet William S. Burroughs to write the play. To do this, they flew to Kansas to meet with Burroughs, who agreed to join their project. Waits travelled to Hamburg in May 1989 to work on the project, and was later joined there by Burroughs.
Real Gone: 2004–2011
Herbert Hardesty, who worked with Waits on Blue Valentine, called him "a very pleasant human being, a very nice person". Humphries referred to him as "an essentially reticent man ... reflective and surprisingly shy". Hoskyns described Waits as "unequivocally—some would say almost gruffly—heterosexual". Waits continued acting, appearing as Mr Nick in Terry Gilliam's 2009 film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. One female fan, recently escaped from a mental health institution in Illinois, began stalking him and lurking outside his Tropicana apartment.
In 2021, Waits had a supporting role in Licorice Pizza, a coming-of-age film by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film director Francis Ford Coppola then asked Waits to return to Los Angeles to write a soundtrack for his forthcoming film, One from the Heart, which was to be set in Las Vegas. Waits was excited, but conflicted, by the prospect; Coppola wanted him to create music akin to his early work, a genre that he was trying to leave behind, and thus he characterized the project as an artistic "step backwards" for him. He nevertheless returned to Los Angeles to work on the soundtrack in a room set aside for the purpose in Coppola's Hollywood studios. This style of working was new to Waits; he later recalled that he was "so insecure when I started ... I was sweating buckets".
Again produced and engineered by Howe , the recording was released as Nighthawks at the Diner in October 1975. The songs from both works later appeared on Alice and Blood Money, the albums Waits released in 2002. In the early-Seventies Tom Waits worked as a doorman at the Heritage in San Diego, a nightclub where artists of every genre performed.
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.
Waits was nominated for the 1982 Academy Award for Original Music Score. During these years, Waits sought to broaden his career beyond music by involving himself in other projects. Waits became friends with the actor and director Sylvester Stallone and made his first cinematic appearance as a cameo part in Stallone's Paradise Alley ; Waits appeared as a drunk piano player. With Paul Hampton, Waits also began writing a movie musical, although this project never came to fruition. Another of the projects he began at this time was a book about entertainers of the past whom he admired.
As of 1982, Waits's musical style shifted; Hoskyns noted that this new style "was fashioned out of diverse and disparate ingredients". Noting that he had a "gravelly timbre" to his voice, Humphries characterized Waits's voice as one that "sounds like it was hauled through Hades in a dredger". His voice was described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding as though "it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car". One of Waits's own favorite descriptions of his vocal style was that of "Louis Armstrong and Ethel Merman meeting in Hell".
Musical style
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.
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