Tom Waits Vinyl Records
In the work of American songwriter Tom Waits, swampy blues, Beat poetry, West Coast jazz, Tin Pan Alley, country, 1930s-era cabaret, and post-Civil War parlour songs meet neon-lit carnival music and wheezing, clattering, experimental rhythms (often played by makeshift musical instruments), forming a keenly individual musical universe. It has often been imitated but never replicated. Since the '70s, Waits has charted a path from playing fleabag dive bars to opera theatres and prestigious concert halls all over the world. His recordings have charted the lives and circumstances of the humble, forgotten, evil, demented, abandoned, cursed, and just plain down-on-their-luck humans to places of honour in our pantheon in a spirit akin to the photographs of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus.