Waits’ gritty Rain Dogs depicted a dark vision of New York’s underbelly, and was shaped by its ‘junkyard orchestra’ of ...

When Tom Waits came onto the music scene in the early 1970s, he was a golden-voiced, handsome piano player/crooner who wrote poetic songs that mixed lyrics and style like a bartender mixes spirits and ...

I was eight years old when I experienced my first Tom Waits song. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. Granted, at the age of eight, that wasn’t saying a lot, but the statement continues to ...

One of Waits’ most mournful songs is ‘Georgia Lee’, written after he heard about the discovery of a 12-year-old girl’s body ...

In 1999, scraggly-voiced junkyard wizard Tom Waits released Mule Variations, his first album in six years. The big punk label Epitaph started its offshoot imprint Anti- specifically to release Mule ...