‘He tried to incorporate the whole history of American song into his loose-limbed poetic storytelling’: Tom Waits in 1983. Photograph: Michael O’Brien Forty years on from the magnificent album ...

Excerpted from “Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones” by David Smay (Continuum, 2007). Reprinted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing. In an otherwise favorable review, Robert Christgau accused Tom’s ...

Exactly how and why Tom Waits made Swordfishtrombones three decades ago can only be understood by first heading even further back and attempting to piece together the man’s unlikely tectonic shift ...

The speakers pop as I gently lay the needle on the groove. A static hiss, a crack from an almost invisible amount of dust and the music begins to waft. I lay down, lights out, to listen and be ...

“No, thanks” might not have been the exact words executives at Elektra/Asylum, Tom Waits’ original label, communicated to their “prestige” artist when declining to release Swordfishtrombones (1983) ...