Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones

Author: David Smay
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441116788
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
Two entwined narratives run through the creation of Swordfishtrombones and form the backbone of this book. As the 1970s ended, Waits felt increasingly constrained and trapped by his persona and career. Bitter and desperately unhappy, he moved to New York in 1979 to change his life. It wasn't working. But at his low point, he got the phone call that changed everything: Francis Ford Coppola tapped Tom to write the score for One From the Heart. Waits moved back to Los Angeles to work at Zoetrope's Hollywood studio for the next 18 months. He cleaned up, disciplined himself as a songwriter and musician, collaborated closely with Coppola, and met a script analyst named Kathleen Brennan - his "only true love". They married within 2 months at the Always and Forever Yours Wedding Chapel at 2am. Swordfishtrombones was the first thing Waits recorded after his marriage, and it was at Kathleen's urging that he made a record that conceded exactly nothing to his record label, or the critics, or his fans. There aren't many love stories where the happy ending sounds like a paint can tumbling in an empty cement mixer. Kathleen Brennan was sorely disappointed by Tom's record collection. She forced him out of his comfortable jazzbo pocket to take in foreign film scores, German theatre, and Asian percussion. These two stories of a man creating that elusive American second act, and also finding the perfect collaborator in his wife give this book a natural forward drive.

Lowside of the Road

Author: Barney Hoskyns
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767927095
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 642

Book Description
With his trademark growl, carnival-madman persona, haunting music, and unforgettable lyrics, Tom Waits is one of the most revered and critically acclaimed singer-songwriters alive today. After beginning his career on the margins of the 1970s Los Angeles rock scene, Waits has spent the last thirty years carving out a place for himself among such greats as Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Like them, he is a chameleonic survivor who has achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. But although his songs can seem deeply personal and somewhat autobiographical, fans still know very little about the man himself. Notoriously private, Waits has consistently and deliberately blurred the line between fact and fiction, public and private personas, until it has become impossible to delineate between truth and self-fabricated legend. Lowside of the Road is the first serious biography to cut through the myths and make sense of the life and career of this beloved icon. Barney Hoskyns has gained unprecedented access to Waits’s inner circle and also draws on interviews he has done with Waits over the years. Spanning his extraordinary forty-year career from Closing Time to Orphans, from his perilous “jazzbo” years in 1970s LA to such shape-shifting albums as Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs to the Grammy Award winners of recent years, this definitive biography charts Waits’s life and art step by step, album by album. Barney Hoskyns has written a rock biography—much like the subject himself—unlike any other. It is a unique take on one of rock’s great enigmas.

Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones

Author: David Smay
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0826427820
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Tom Waits on Tom Waits

Author: Paul Maher
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569769273
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Book Description
Tom Waits, even with his barnyard growl and urban hipster yawp, may just be what the Daily Telegraph calls him: &“the greatest entertainer on Planet Earth.&” Over a span of almost four decades, he has transformed his music and persona not to suit the times but his whims. But along with Bob Dylan, he stands as one of the last elder statesmen still capable of putting out music that matters. Journalists intent upon cracking the code are more likely to come out of a Waits interview with anecdotes about the weather, insects, or medieval medicine. He is, in essence, the teacher we wished we had, dispensing insights such as: &“Vocabulary is my main instrument;&” &“We all like music, but what we really want is for music to like us;&” &“Anything you absorb you will ultimately secrete;&” &“Growth is scary, because you're a seed and you're in the dark and you don't know which way is up, and down might take you down further into a darker place . . .;&” and &“There is no such thing as nonfiction. . . . People who really know what happened aren't talking. And the people who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up.&” Tom Waits on Tom Waits is a selection of over fifty interviews from the more than five hundred available. Here Waits delivers prose as crafted, poetic, potent, and haunting as the lyrics of his best songs.

Wild Years

Author: Jay S Jacobs
Publisher: ECW Press
ISBN: 1554902614
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 598

Book Description
Legend. Bum. Genius. Con Man. Devoted husband and father. Myth. Storyteller. Inspiration. Drunk. Visionary. Tom Waits is all of these things. Waits is the lifeline between the great Beat poets and today's rock & roll heroes. He's old enough to be your dad and cool enough to be your hero. One of the few truly original musicians recording today, he's also the rare singer who can actually act, and he has put together a respectable body of work in movies. Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits retraces the long road that Waits has traveled and explores the music that made him a legend. Jay S. Jacobs looks at the towering myth that Waits has created for himself. Jay S. Jacobs follows the fate of one of America's pre-eminent artists, a very private man whose career embodies a quirky array of fulfillment and loss, beauty and strangeness. This revised and updated edition includes a new chapter, with insight on Waits' career in the 21st century thus far, as well as the most complete discography available in print. Tom's Wild Years ' a poignant, revealing celebration of the man and all his myths.

Tom Waits by Matt Mahurin

Author: Matt Mahurin
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1683356586
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
A collection of wildly inventive portraits of musician Tom Waits, the result of a 30-year collaboration with photographer and illustrator Matt Mahurin This visually arresting book is a testament to the unique collaboration, going back three decades, between the photographer and illustrator Matt Mahurin and the musician Tom Waits. Having shot magazine portraits, album covers, and music videos of Waits, Mahurin was inspired to resurrect 100 dormant film negatives as a jumping off point to explore his own surreal, poetic, and occasionally dark vision. The images vary from traditional portraits to ones that capture Waits in concert—but the majority are richly imagined scenes in which Waits is more muse than musician. In addition to the diverse images, the book includes a foreword by Waits, an essay by Mahurin on their longtime collaboration, and 20 original paintings, drawings, photographs, and digital images inspired by Waits’s song titles.

The Early Years

Author: Tom Waits
Publisher: Ecco
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
A collection of works by the acclaimed American singer, songwriter, actor, and composer showcases lyrics from his first ten albums, from his first, Closing Time in 1973, to his experimental works from 1980 in Heartattack and Vine, and beyond. 40,000 first printing.

Waits/Corbijn '77-'11

Author: Anton Corbijn
Publisher: Schirmer Mosel
ISBN: 9783829605557
Category : Rock musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Waits/Corbijn '77-'11 is the chronicle of an artistic collaboration that reaches bach more than 35 years, to those first black-and-white photographs of Tom Waits taken by a young Anton Corbijn in Holland in 1977. Waits' own photography, collected here for the first time under the title "Curiosities," gives a visual handle to the artistic intelligence millions of fans know only through his music.

Alice

Author: Tom Waits
Publisher: Music Sales
ISBN: 9780825619427
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
(Music Sales America). A tender song-cycle loosely based on a stage production about Alice Liddell, the young girl who inspired Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Arranged for piano, voice and guitar, with lyric sheets and artwork. Includes: Alice * Table Top Joe * Watch Her Disappear * I'm Still Here * and more.

Total Records

Author: Jacques Denis
Publisher: Aperture Foundation
ISBN: 9781597113847
Category : Musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The history of photography is teeming with portraits of musicians made iconic through their use on album covers: Thelonious Monk by W. Eugene Smith; Miles Davis by Irving Penn; Grace Jones by Jean Paul Goode; Laurie Anderson by Robert Mapplethorpe. Includes record albums featuring images by David Bailey, Guy Bourdin, Anton Corbijn, Roy DeCarava, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Luigi Ghirri, John Paul Goode, Brian Griffin, William Klein, David LaChapelle, Danny Lyon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Ryan McGinley, Helmut Newton, Martin Parr, Anders Peterson, Pierre et Gilles, Hiro, Cindy Sherman, W. Eugene Smith, Pennie Smith, Jurgen Teller, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, Albert Watson, William Wegman, and more.