Tom Waits - A Life on the Wrong Side

Tom Waits is one of the greatest rock artists (and not only rock) bequeathed to us by the 20th century. Over a thirty-year career, he has built an enviable reputation, founded on a professional ethic never dented by commercial temptations or celebrity posturing, but above all on a series of albums of the very highest quality.

From an iconographic point of view, Waits's art is the art of a storyteller who has always viewed America and its ideals with a critical eye, preferring to tell the so-called "wrong side" of the stars-and-stripes imagination, populated by vagrants, aimlessly wandering souls ("rain dogs") and outcasts of every kind. Waits's imagination is the same as that of Bukowski and those poets who grew up within the American underground counterculture, who, in the '60s and '70s, took up a hostile, if not scornful, attitude toward the American way of life. Waits tells of an American dream that, admiring its own bluster in the distorting mirrors of a funfair, suddenly discovers itself to be a nightmare. But even before the singers of the beat generation, the first stirrings of Waits's poetics can be traced back to the cursed narratives of Robert Johnson, and even further back, to the very concept of Americanness — or rather, its negation. To be American means to wage a battle to free oneself from the limitations with which the individual is born, as Greil Marcus explains in "Mystery Train".

In other words, America draws its vital energy from every citizen's will to improve their existential condition by exploiting their innate, individual talents, and by trusting in the promise of infinite possibility that the great country offers them. And it is precisely from the undoing of this promise, from the personal defeats that irrevocably disprove it, from the annihilation of eagerly pursued hopes, that a micro-universe of macabre desolation and everyday marginalization is born — a micro-universe that in turn constitutes the emotional corpus from which the greatest American songwriters, Waits included, have drawn. Despite the experimental scope of his music, Waits remains, fundamentally, an American artist, with whatever caveats one might feel the need to add.

But within the imaginative universe of the American song, his stories are the exact counterpart to springsteenian poetics. The Boss, in a populist — if not demagogic — narrative mode, tells of the hardships, tragedies and defeats of ordinary people, who nonetheless, in a nationalistic surge, or rather in a stubborn will to keep cradling themselves in the great American dream, manage to face them with pride, or at least with dignity. Springsteen feeds people what they want to hear. Waits's nation, by contrast, is inhabited by the people of the slums, resigned to vegetating below the survival line, cut off from any possibility of redemption. They are "freaks" in their social condition, born with the indelible mark of the defeated. His poetics therefore implies a critique of America, but also of the regime's bards who extol its greatness, regarding the hypocrisy and indifference with which these people are treated.

Waits removes the slices of baloney from the eyes of the Uncle Sam lurking within the average American, lifts the lids off the pots, and exposes the rot beneath that veneer of false solidarity typical of the country's conservative fringe.

Born in Pomona, near Hollywood, California, in 1949, Tom Waits soon crossed paths with another great "maudit", Charles Bukowski, with whom he shared a provocative embrace of excess and marginalization. Their "stellar friendship" ignited in a smoky Los Angeles club packed with fans of the old "Buk". Waits sang a ballad accompanying himself on guitar, while Hank performed one of his readings (the encounter was filmed by Ron Mann in 1982's "Poetry in Motion").

Bards of the underworld, of the "wrong side" of the American dream's failure, the two men had behind them a long tradition of the "blessed and the battered", which included Henry Miller, the Beat poets, and the whole of California's underground culture.

Tom Waits's artistic career grew out of the financial hardships of his childhood. Still a teenager, he was forced to take menial jobs to earn a living. These were the years he spent wandering all night through the streets of Los Angeles, listening to the stories of prostitutes, drunks, vagrants, and minor and major Beat poets — stories that would later resurface in his songs. His passion for excess is summed up in one of his famous lines: "I can't understand people who hide in reality because they're afraid to face drugs."

Then one evening, under the influence of alcohol, he began to fool around on an old piano in the restaurant where he worked as a dishwasher. People listened to his outlandish stories, got involved, laughed, were moved, and conversed with his old-bluesman voice. The manager recognized his talent and asked the young waiter to entertain the crowd every night. Waits earned only a few dollars, but he managed to make a name for himself singing old songs from the '40s and '50s that he'd heard as a child. His father had given him his first musical grounding and passed on his love of jazz, particularly for the great drummer Gene Krupa. It was the end of "heroic shit" (Bukowski), of menial jobs and squalid rented rooms. It was the beginning of young Tom's story, as he started touring the clubs of Los Angeles backed by an excellent jazz band. As a true underground artist, he shunned the spotlight, fame, and showbiz. He lived in the city's underbelly and came out at night, offering up desperate, aching poetry, brimming with love.

His first album was Closing Time, from 1973, whose title alludes to the closing hour of bars and clubs. It isn't a masterpiece yet, but it contains the gorgeous "Ol' 55", a love song for his old car. His passion for cars and reckless highway races would stay with him forever.

The second track too, "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You", immediately unleashes all his desperate, sorrow-tinged poetry, telling of a possible lifelong love blown away by pride and indecision. "Martha", a snapshot of a love faded with time, and the other ballad "Ice Cream Man" move along the same aching register.

Overall, it's an intimate, confessional debut album that already hints at many of the qualities of Waits the balladeer, as well as his skill at building anguished atmospheres with the barest of means, as in the title-track instrumental, "Closing Time".

It was an intense period, a dissolute life as a "rain dog" (as the vagrants of Los Angeles are called), of colossal benders, fleeting loves, and encounters with great figures.

1974 brought his second album, Heart Of A Saturday Night, a "journey to the end of the night" where darkness lingers even in broad daylight, as in some of René Magritte's famous paintings. Producer Bones Howe's hand was decisive, framing the tracks with smoky, nocturnal atmospheres. But it's a transitional work, suspended between the insights of his early records and the full flowering of his style, which would also come about through the evolution of his distinctive vocal timbre.

Ballads still dominate ("San Diego Serenade", "Shiver Me Timbers", "Drunk On The Moon"), always with deeply poetic, aching overtones matched by spare, carefully calibrated arrangements. The impassioned "Diamonds On My Windshield", for voice and double bass, meanwhile sketches out the model of waitsian talking blues that would take hold on his subsequent records.

1975 brought another intense, biting chapter with the double album Nighthawks At The Diner (1975), inspired by Edward Hopper's famous 1942 painting of the same name, Nighthawks. It's a collection of talking blues in live form, which Waits delivers in masterful fashion, backed by a jazz quartet, amid drunken loves and rotting snapshots of a nocturnal Los Angeles teeming with shady, disreputable characters ("Spare Parts", "Warm Beer And Cold Women").

The Californian songwriter wanders through his beloved dives, buoyed by an incisive jazz backdrop. And almost every track is preceded by a cabaret-style interlude, in which the author narrates the song's genesis, often in a comic key.

Among the most successful tracks is “Better Off Without A Wife”, in which Waits reels off, in his own inimitable way, the perks of being “single”: “Midnight howlin’ at the moon/ Goin’ out when I want to, comin’ home when I please/ Don’t have to ask permission if I want to go out fishing/ Never have to ask for the keys”. The song closes, however, with a mocking wedding march… In the introduction to “Putnam County”, meanwhile, Waits offers the audience a round of beer, only to add that someone from the bar will stop them on the way out with the check.

But, aside from the ironic quality of the lyrics, what stands out are the musical harmonies of thoroughly captivating episodes, such as “On A Foggy Night”, “Eggs And Sausage”, the aching, slow-paced jazz of “Warm Beer And Cold Women” and the disarming “Big Joe and Phantom 309”, with Waits on guitar.

Waits molds the blues to his own liking, and masters it as only a select few (Nick Cave and Captain Beefheart) know how to do.

In 1976 the Pomona-born singer-songwriter further widens his musical horizons with Small Change. Jazz openings, melancholy blues, songs of love and solitude make this album his first great masterpiece. Tipsy, desperate vignettes like “Jitterbug Boy”, “The Piano Has Been Drinking”, “Invitation To The Blues” and “I Can’t Wait To Get Off Work” wink at jazz and blues standards, going beyond traditional conventions and thus opening up new perspectives for the genres.

In “Tom Traubert’s Blues” the typical Waitsian swoon is backed by a chamber-pop orchestra, while “Wish I Was In New Orleans” is another plunge into jazz-blues territory, with its ever-nostalgic, melancholy accents. The near-parody of Armstrong in the dixieland jazz of “Step Right Up”, finally, shows the full exuberant vitality of an artist still very much growing, yet already in command of his expressive means, including his voice, ever more sooty and hoarse, the ideal vehicle for penetrating the most unspeakable recesses of the American metropolis.

But there's no time to pause, because Tom wants to keep playing, keep experimenting. It's time for Foreign Affairs. His writing draws on childhood memories. The song “Burma Shave” takes its title from a brand of shaving foam that the young Tom believed to be an imaginary place. “I Never Talk To Strangers” tells of the difficulty of a man and a woman meeting when she's wary of strangers. “Jack & Neal”, meanwhile, is a wild, desperate journey in search of the freedom of the two quintessential Beat poets, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. And then there's the masterpiece “Potter’s Field”, drawn from the otherworldly memories of a strange Spoon River.

During these years, Waits is romantically involved with singer Rickie Lee Jones, which puts an end, for a while, to his countless flings.

In 1978 Blue Valentine is released. And once again Waits chooses to stand “on the wrong side” (“Wrong Side Of The Road”, as one of the album's most effective ballads is titled), on the side of those with no voice, cut out of history, those losers and outcasts described by his friend Bukowski. It's an album of letters (the title alludes to “Blue valentines”, Valentine's Day love letters), written with the reticence of someone who suffers and who knows it's getting harder and harder to love in a big city.

Perhaps more accessible, even when he embarks on his boozy nocturnal soliloquies (the tormented “$29.00”, the aching title track), Waits doesn't give up playing the showman, the seasoned cabaret master (“Christmas Card”), winking once again at jazz (“Romeo Is Bleeding”) or galloping headlong into horror-tinged blues (“Whistling Past The Graveyard”, “A Sweet Little Bullet”, “Red Shoes”), which revive a Southern gothic mythology later so dear to his finest disciple, Nick Cave.

Between the fetid dives of the underground and Broadway's glittering stage, another memorable chapter of the Waitsian film plays out, a colossal of human desolation, always seasoned with extraordinary lyrical touches.

Two years of pause, and Waits records Heartattack And Wine (1980). His voice grows ever rougher, downright “lycanthropic”. The more malicious critics claim “there's enough tar in it to pave an entire highway”. The album still features his beloved themes, such as love, the blues, played on old Hammond organs, and childhood.

The title track opens in glory, aiming straight for the heart, as its title suggests, with the usual arsenal of emotional tricks and booze fumes. Depressive, post-bender tones dominate, with tipsy blues like “Mr. Siegal” and narcoleptic ballads like the opening title track.

But there's no shortage of new, raw forays into the urban underbelly (“Downtown”), wild bursts of energy (“Til’ The Money Runs Out”) and music-hall love odes (“Ruby’s Arms”, “On The Nickel”). The album also includes the classic “Jersey Girl”, later covered by Bruce Springsteen.

But this musical encounter doesn't seem to sit too well with Waits, who once again shies away from success and seeks new paths. The opportunity comes from director Francis Ford Coppola, who asks him to write the soundtrack for his film “One From The Heart”. An encounter that will also turn into a nightmare for Waits, due to the obsessive perfectionism of the director of “Apocalypse Now”.

Out of these collaborations comes Waits's film career as well. First small parts with Coppola himself in “The Outsiders”, in “Rumble Fish” and “Cotton Club”, then a role all his own in “Down By Law” (1986), directed by Jim Jarmusch, featuring a hilarious duet with Roberto Benigni. The film shows the truest Waits, with his hat, his “alligator's shoes”, his trademark pointy shoes that look like “alligators” (hence the name), and that funny, indolent, monkey-like sway of his.

Yet cinema doesn't pull him away from music — if anything, it opens up new avenues for experimentation: the excellent Swordfishtrombones (1983) stands as a major turning point in his career. It marks the sharp, irreversible shift from a merely gifted pseudo-crooner of smoky cocktail-jazz nightclubs into an erudite postmodern composer, capable of conceiving a kind of total music indebted as much to the masters of American songwriting as to a whole range of other musical forms rooted in African, European and other folk traditions. The blending of such disparate sounds gave rise to a series of rhythmic asymmetries, dissonances and cabaret-style out-of-tune touches, which nonetheless bear the stamp of classicism, since the musical models that generated these sounds are themselves classic — in the sense of traditional, now part of a shared and decoded heritage.

The outcasts, or more broadly the "losers" (though never "beautiful"), remain the protagonists. The conceptual heart of the record lies in the dichotomous convergence of salvation and damnation; Waits's characters, painfully aware of their own existence, seem almost to long, in a kind of ethical void, for some event that — desirable or amoral as it may be — could act as catharsis for their condition. In this sense, the shadowy, at times depressive mood of the songs turns the album into a sung mass, through which the unredeemed souls are delivered to the salvation of a paradisiacal hell — certainly more desirable than the atrocious, inexhaustible transience of everyday life.

This explains the lucid, grotesque madness of Frank in "Frank's Wild Years", or the squalor celebrated in "Gin Soaked Boy", narrative fragments that renew the archetypal figure of the loser beyond any plausible hope of redemption.

Marked by a martial rhythm reminiscent of a military march, with the electric guitar following Waits's vocal inflections and horn and acoustic bass lending it a rural dimension, "Underground" is perhaps the ultimate metaphor for Waits's entire poetics. Telling of an underground (mining) city, toiling away while the rest of the world sleeps, Waits conjures up that universe of the wretched, drifting almost clandestinely, like a wreck, across the sea of bourgeois opulence. In a rarefied yet dark, film-noir atmosphere, Waits unleashes "Shore Leave", one of his most brilliant experiments in blending disparate sonorities. An Afro-Caribbean dance rhythm (aided by marimba and assorted jingling percussion) accompanies a bluesy banjo veering into free-form distortion, with Waits's deep voice rounding out this nonsensical collage of "swamp" exoticism. "Dave The Butcher" is a tiny instrumental gem, where bass and percussion weave a lopsided rhythmic bed, over which the Hammond organ lays down a series of melodic phrases whose effect is more disorienting than psychedelic.

The romantic, melancholy streak emerges in the splendid "Johnsburg, Illinois", where Waits, accompanied only by piano and Greg Cohen's bass, delivers lyrics that would be more fitting for the repertoire of a Chris Isaak: “There’s a place on my arm where I’ve written her name/ Next to mine/ You see I just can’t live without her/ I’m her only boy and she grew up outside McHenry/ in Johnsburg, Illinois”. After so much romanticism, the raw rock'n'roll of "16 Shells From A 30.6" suddenly bursts in, a track that could almost pass for a Beefheart song played with the rhythmic straightforwardness of the Cramps.

"Town With No Cheer" drips with the mood of an Australian town (Service Town) left to its own devices, with Waits mumbling words over a minimal sonic backdrop, following an evocative bagpipe introduction that conjures the image of a spectral, solitary ghost town. "In The Neighborhood" is backed by an actual brass band, rounded out by percussion instruments and the inevitable Hammond organ: it feels like being transported to Twin Peaks, or better yet, to the small-town setting of Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter", where weddings, funerals and departures for the front disturbed — but only in that fleeting instant — the mood of a community forever identical to itself. "Just Another Sucker On The Wine" is another delightful instrumental where Waits's harmonium, gently countered by Joe Romano's trumpet, manages to conjure a melancholy spleen. In the talking-jazz delirium of "Frank's Wild Years", every semblance of civility is lost, and the resulting barbarism is the product of a mind torn apart by the flow of a mediocre daily existence. Yet another performance of seasoned stage-comedian flair appears in "Swordfishtrombone", while in "Down Down Down" Waits unleashes the full semiotic arsenal of archaic rural bluesmen, complete with driving rhythm, a tar-thick voice ravaged by smoke and alcohol, and a hallucinated storyline.

The emotional peak of the record, though, is "Soldier's Things", in which Waits, transfigured into a ghetto Frank Sinatra, narrates the contents of a box of personal effects belonging to a soldier killed in battle. Another gritty dive-bar blues number is "Gin Soaked Boy", with the electric guitar stealing the show much like on a B.B. King track. "Trouble's Braids" is a cursed, Nick Cave-style soliloquy, accompanied by clanging percussion and an acoustic bass that drives the rhythm forward relentlessly.

Swordfishtrombones is a multifaceted document on American root music, a postmodern essay on reinventing the body of the blues using native musical materials that, in Waits's hands, take on a trans-ethnic character.

Having moved to New York, on the following Rain Dogs (1985) Waits shifts toward a slightly more immediate formula, flirting with conventional song form and theatrical atmospheres. He's backed by a platoon of exceptional guests, including John Lurie, Robert Quine, Marc Ribot, and Keith Richards.

Even though the opening of "Singapore", with its tribal swagger and exotic winks, still showcases the histrionics of the ogre-bluesman, his deep voice all rust and tar, the dissonant excesses of the previous record seem to have mellowed slightly, giving way to structures closer to pop-rock and folk conventions (respectively, "Clap Hands" and "Hang Down Your Head").

Nonetheless, the record proves to be another masterpiece, thanks to a collection of gems that confirms the full class and versatility of the maestro from Pomona. The acoustic ode of "Time" lays bare the tenderest side of an open-hearted Waits, capable of melting into sentimentality deep into the night with his smoky voice amid the notes of the epic "Jockey Full Of Bourbon", steeped in alcohol, wrinkles and despair, as well as in the closing "Anywhere I Lay My Head", or over the poignant cadences of the title track, another piece of gutter poetry kneaded from tar and raw feeling.

There's no shortage of old-school gritty blues ("Gun Street Girl"), street-musician accordion (the title track), startling new romantic odes ("Blind Love"), suspended, nostalgic atmospheres ("Walking Spanish"), while "Tango Till They're Sore" shows off all of Waits's skill as an arranger, with dark, cinematic tones that then spill over into something close to a liturgy of horror in the frenzied "Big Black Mariah".

The epic streak resurfaces in the Springsteen-esque anthem "Downtown Train", which Waits dresses in dark, melodramatic hues. But his talent also shows in the shorter, more concise pieces, like the raving "Cemetery Polka", driven along by trombone blasts — something Vinicio Capossela undoubtedly owes a great deal to — which keeps alive the connection to the exuberant sound of Swordfishtrombones.

The lyrics mix deranged irony, nonsense, horror and despair into a poetic blend of undeniable power, one that constantly unsettles and surprises. Waits keeps digging into the crevices of the soul and seems able to go ever deeper, uncovering the most unmentionable viscera of the human race with the smirk of an unrepentant nightclub jester.

1987 brought Frank's Wild Years, another significant milestone in the artistic evolution of the maestro from Pomona, inspired by a musical play with Waits himself in the lead role, which in turn had grown out of the song of the same name from four years earlier.

Absurdly enough, Tom Waits, with his “infernal” voice, becomes a kind of Frank Sinatra (whom he impersonates in "I'll Take New York") for the other side of America, the underground one. Marimbas, banjos, percussion, Keith Richards' guitar and a love for the music of the great Kurt Weill combine to create a brilliant fusion of seemingly disparate elements, making Waits one of the most original American rock musicians of all time. His songwriting also grows increasingly concise, spare, allusive, almost cinematic, while his instrumental arsenal is enriched with homemade percussion, old bric-a-brac and even an ox horn used to filter his voice.

This is how these tormented, desolate ballads come to life: the opening "Hang On St Christopher", marked by a fanfare beat and scarred by guitars; the spectral requiem of "Blow Wind Blow", for organ and mandolin; the feverish hallucination of "Straight To The Top"; the ghostly western of "Yesterday Is Here". This is music built with few sonic frills, bare and raw in its cosmic melancholy: on "Innocent When You Dream" a single accordion is enough to ennoble a cavernous, whisky-soaked dirge, while the accordion of "More Than Rain" and "Cold Cold Ground" transports us straight to a drizzly Paris, irreversibly a prisoner of the past.

More eccentric episodes, such as the exotic "I'll Be Gone", with accordion, marimba and trombone taking center stage, and the eccentric serenade of "Telephone Call", open up a few cracks of light, but Waits' human comedy spares nothing and no one, culminating in the desperate ode of "Train Song", the epitome of the Pomona master's universal pessimism.

Tom Waits' great circus is sealed in 1988 by his first live album, Big Time, containing much of his finest repertoire from the Eighties. It's a testament to the extraordinary performances of one of the greatest entertainers in the history of rock.

During this period Waits devoted himself mainly to film scores, with One From The Heart (1981) and Night On Earth in 1992, bolstered by fresh examples of his surreal cabaret ("Good Old World") and effective instrumentals ("Los Angeles Theme", "Dragging A Dead Priest"), while the subsequent theatrical work "The Black Rider" (1993), staged in 1990 in Hamburg by Robert Wilson, with William Burroughs on vocals, includes some of the music re-recorded by Waits with a different cast.

In this period of chaotic activity for film and theatre, Waits still managed to land the blow of Bone Machine (1992), his first album of original material not belonging to a soundtrack in seven years. The album once again draws a roster of star guests to the Pomona singer-songwriter's side, including Keith Richards, Primus bassist Les Claypool, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and the ever-present Ralph Carney.

The tracklist offers a chiaroscuro alternation, in which every dark song has its counterpart in another, lighter and more carefree one. The festive anthem "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" stands out, an excited, almost childlike ode to his eternal unruly youth. "Black Wings" soars on a radiant melodic opening, which could ideally be paired with the sincere sentimentality of "Whistle Down The Wind", while "Goin' Out West" even indulges in an exuberant surf gait.

But there's no shortage of other plunges into nightmare, into his typical noir landscapes, such as the opening "Earth Died Screaming", the pitch-black requiem of "Dirt In The Ground" and the equally funereal "Such A Scream", while "All Stripped Down" once again puts the werewolf-entertainer center stage, both frightening and, by now, a bit predictable.

The excellent anthology Beautiful Maladies (1998) marks a milestone in the Pomona master's career, collecting 23 of his memorable hits, including "Hang on St. Christopher", "Underground", "I Don't Wanna Grow Up", "Downtown Train", "Singapore" and "16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six".

Meanwhile, the Californian singer-songwriter no longer leads the unruly life he once did. He no longer drinks. He's married to Kathleen Brennan (who has become the sole manager of all his assets) and has two children. But he still keeps shouting, with his voice now ravaged by alcohol, that life has its wrong side. “I didn't marry a man, I married a mule,” his wife once told him. And he replied: “Yes, but I've undergone my own changes too…” That's how Tom Waits chose the title for Mule Variations (1999), literally: “the mule's changes.” The bard of underground America and of “life on the wrong side” returns to captivate us with his small-town stories, his lonely hearts and his rust-and-honey voice. A grainy voice that pours out into harsh, feverish blues, always steeped in a melancholic vein, as in the splendid "Chocolate Jesus".

Time passes, his voice grows more and more like a grater, worn down by an iron diet of alcohol and cigarettes, but the piano is always there within reach and ideas are never lacking. And Mule Variations, written with the collaboration of his wife (“I bring home the groceries and she cooks,” Tom Waits explains of their creative process), once again offers a handful of sincere, moving songs. There are sixteen tracks balanced between harsh moments and sudden romantic flights, as in the best tradition of the American singer-songwriter. They're rasping, often delirious blues, marked by clangs and percussion of every kind, guttural and distorted sounds. “The idea was to play something halfway between surreal and rural. So they're basically ‘surrural' songs,” he explains.

Made peaceful by the positive experience of marriage, Waits allows himself his lightest record, while at the same time showing off every weapon in his arsenal: the showman's cacophonous bacchanals ("Big In Japan", "Filipino Box Spring Hog", "Eyeball Kid"), the tipsy late-night-show blues ("Get Behind The Mule", "Black Market Baby", "Lowside Of The Road"), but also the poignant ballads "Hold On" and "Cold Water", the cabaret pianist's skill on "Georgia Lee", the honky-tonk number "House Where Nobody Lives", and the gospel anthem "Come On Up To The House".

If, as Waits says, “the only reason to write new songs is that you've grown tired of the old ones,” seven years of waiting have not been in vain. They served to let us hear once more the Waits of his best days, capable of captivating and moving us with his hoarse, almost tuneless voice, like a singer in some dazed, surreal piano bar, with the sincerity of a free-spirited singer-songwriter and the sickly hues of his ballads.

So Waits gets back on track, despite the passing years. And in 2002 he even returns with two albums, Alice and Blood Money, which reveal him once again as a bizarre and versatile composer as well as a biting performer, with unreleased songs dating back to the Nineties, originally written as soundtracks for theatrical productions.

Alice opens with the title track: a ballad of excruciating melancholy with a very jazzy arrangement; it's the nocturnal, decadent ballad that sets the stylistic tone of the record, at times with superlative results (as in "No one knows I'm gone", "I'm still here", "Fish and bird"); there's certainly no shortage of different moments either, like the spastic dance of "Everything you can think" or the surreal cabaret of "Kommienezuspadt" and "Reeperbahn", or like "Table Top Joe", almost parodic in its ostentatious nod to the vocal jazz of the early twentieth century, but it's in the leaden, sweet ballads that the author and the album find their fullest dimension, at times wrapping the voice in gentle hints of classicism through the use of strings, as in the already mentioned "No one knows I'm gone", a piece with a limpid melodic structure, or as in "Poor Edward" or the poignant "Lost in the harbour"; the brief, evocative instrumental "Fawn" closes a delicately melancholic album.

A somewhat different mood is struck instead by Blood Money, which opens with the march of "Misery is the river of the world" and continues with the estranging rumba of "Everything goes to hell"; a musically more ambitious record, with an instrumental structure that allows itself some attempts at dissonance in its moments of greatest freedom, especially in the use of horns, as for instance in "Knife Chase". It's also an album with a slightly harsher, more schizophrenic framework, with a much more limited use of strings and a more extreme vocal approach, as in "Starving in the belly of a whale" or "God's away on business" — or, if you prefer, a more theatrical one. A track like "Coney Island Baby", perfectly suited to being sung under the tree on Christmas night while it snows outside, stays with you; "All the world is green" is gorgeous, and at times, as if through a distorting lens, you catch glimpses of ghosts: the 1930s, the Zeppelin, the Titanic sinking with its orchestra still playing, Lili Marlene.

A double act — Alice and Blood Money — that makes it clear how the Tom Waits of the new millennium has absolutely no intention of handing over the scepter to the new generation of songwriters crowding "on the wrong side of the road", in the new indie resurgence.

Two years later came Real Gone (2004), Waits's postmodern record, steeped in lurching rhythms and adrenaline-fuelled voids exactly where you'd expect sturdy guitars. Marc Ribot appears on a couple of tracks, and you can hear it in the Latin-tinged southern tango of "Hoist That Rag"; elsewhere, the crooked blues of his early days meets funk dynamics, as in "Metropolitan Glide", or again in "Shake It", which he himself has described as "cubist funk".

We're caught off guard by rough hip-hop fragments set inside improbable rhythm'n'blues, and "Baby Gonna Leave Me" is a case in point. But the usual Waits-style murder ballads aren't missing either, with "Dead And Lovely" aspiring to a place among his very best.

The album closes fittingly with "Day After Tomorrow", a personal protest postcard addressed to the lords of war. A record that's perhaps a touch too self-referential, but undeniably classy.

In 2006 Waits returned with a work entirely built around his vocal versatility: Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, a triple CD that attempts to map out three more or less distinct sides of what the Pomona songwriter has created over these decades of his career. It's not a compilation, since it mostly contains unreleased tracks, but at the same time it is also a compilation, since it houses plenty of gems, including songs written for films and documentaries and several covers that first appeared on tribute albums to other artists.

The first disc shows us the more recent side of Waits, that of gravelly blues and boogie, the tavern-and-dive-bar Waits, as the liner notes aptly put it; the CD is packed with blues, ranging from the devilish "Lucinda" to the almost gospel traditional "Lord I've Been Changed", from the Leadbelly cover "Ain't Goin' Down To The Well" to "Buzz Fledderjohn", recorded outdoors complete with a barking dog in the background, from the Beefheart-esque "2:19" to the closing "Rains On Me", dirty and powerful. But "Brawlers" doesn't live on canonical blues alone: there's the psycho-billy of "Lie To Me", the garage rock of "LowDown", the punk-blues of "The Return Of Jack & Judy" (which appeared on "We Are Happy Family – Tribute To Ramones") and the gorgeous "Walk Away", one of the best pieces from the "Dead Man Walking" soundtrack.

The second disc, "Bawlers", sets out to capture Waits's romantic, subdued side, the one of sad ballads, and it's also the one most packed with previously released songs, almost all of them used in soundtracks, from 1984's "Take Care Of All My Children" to the very recent "You Can Never Hold Back Spring", written for Benigni's film "La tigre e la neve". At the heart of the record lies a moment of great emotional intensity, in which Waits draws on all the tenderness he's capable of, starting with "Tell It To Me" (recorded by John Hammond under the title "Louise"), followed by the Celtic-flavoured "Never Let Go" (heard in the closing credits of "American Hearts"), but the peak comes with "Fanning Street", where Waits's voice becomes as light as a feather, a whisper barely veiled by a guitar in the background, recalling the best moments of Springsteen's "The Ghost Of Tom Joad". The emotion continues through the following "Little Man" (gorgeous) and "It's Over", in which the Californian singer dons the guise of a jazz-club crooner amid breaths of sax and trumpet, light-touch pianos and brushed drums, or in "If I Have To Go", which recalls the days of "Closing Time" and "Blue Valentines".

The bastards ("Bastards") are the offspring of a different Waits, experimental and twisted, and indeed this record contains quite a few things that fans of the more canonical Tom won't be used to; first and foremost the spoken-word pieces, perhaps a bit excessive. Still, there are plenty of interesting tracks: from the Brechtian "What Keeps Mankind Alive" to the deranged version of "Heigh Ho" (the march of the seven dwarfs as if they wanted to kill the witch, or worse, Snow White). But the gems don't end there; there's a woozy version of Sparklehorse's "Dog Door", the croaking, wheezing "Spider Wild Ride" and a tribal "King Kong" (from "Late Great Daniel Johnston – Discovered, Covered"), an "Alter Boy" that harks back to the forgotten "Nighthours At The Diner", and two versions of Kerouac's "On The Road", one in ballad form and the other played as blues, both gorgeous.

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards is no trivial document — that is, it goes well beyond the logic of a "Best Of" — of Waits's art in all its forms, a snapshot of his many musical personalities.

Five years go by and it's the turn of Bad As Me (2011). An album in which the Pomona songwriter revisits every facet of his long career, surveying from a bird's-eye view the twenty-odd albums he's released and picking up elements here and there. The devilish blues of "Chicago", which opens the record, catapults us into Waits's quirky, uneven universe, taking us back to his roaring '80s. Together with the following "Raised Right Men", with its acidly sickly gait, and the smoky ballad "Talking At The Same Time", it forms a spine-chilling trio that wouldn't have been out of place on Swordfishtrombones or Rain Dogs. The Sixties-tinged jazz'n'roll of "Get Lost" brings things back to life after the dark opening, but it's just a brief pause before the desert ballad "Face To The Highway".

The mournful dirge "Pay Me" paves the way for the Tex-Mex breath of "Back In The Crowd", before we're plunged back into hell with the unsettling title track, terrifying in its brief spoken verses that seem to come straight from Satan. The ballad "Kiss Me", delivered with razor-sharp elegance on the edge of the vinyl, is a harrowing touch, a premonitory cry leading into the wheezing blues of "Satisfied". Keith Richards's cameo on the desolate "Last Leaf" adds a touch of class to the album without contributing much else, before the magnificent closing pair. "Hell Broke Luce" is the last, cavernous, martial charge of Waits's career, which amid screams and gunfire dissolves into the languid, soft choral warmth of "New Year's Eve".

It'll always be the same old story, some might say. But Waits doesn't miss a beat and still casts the same spell he did thirty years ago. Rust and honey blend seamlessly together, a bittersweet mix we've already savoured but never tire of.

Contributions by Antonio Ciarletta, Valerio Bispuri, Luigi Toni, Michele Chiusi, Gianni Candellari, Marco Pagliariccio

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google