Everybody's Dummy

[The following is a letter I have sent to Tony Bennett's management. I'd love to see this happen.] Dear Ms. Weiner: I'm hoping...

As with each of the albums Tom Waits has put out over the last 20 years, critics fell all over Bad As Me , starting with superlatives like ...

In the decade since “returning” to music with Mule Variations , Tom toured occasionally, usually for short stretches and hitting cities som...

Best described by the man himself as “a bunch of things that fell behind the stove while making dinner,” Orphans is a three-CD set present...

Well, here was something different. Tom Waits had already gained renown for making music out of “found sounds”, and since his eldest son ha...

While it hadn’t been waiting as long as Alice , Blood Money came from the same general source: a pre-industrial tale dramatized by Robert ...

He’d come back in such a resounding way with Mule Variations , so it was with relative speed that Tom Waits resurfaced yet again with not o...

Just in time for the end of the century, Tom Waits came back from too long an absence with the sixteen new songs that comprise Mule Variati...

Besides being a very private man, Tom Waits is incredibly protective of his legacy. The lawsuits he’s won against advertisers that have bor...

It’s entirely possible that his last album avoided an overlying concept for the simple reason that he was working on something else entirel...

The so-called Island trilogy of the mid-‘80s arguably brought Tom Waits the widest notoriety of his career to date. Then he took another br...

There had been something of a lull since “the Island trilogy”, during which Our Hero made a few movies and started some lawsuits but produc...

Despite the theatrical genesis of Franks Wild Years , it was never made into a narrative movie. Instead, Tom’s tour behind the album was fi...

Soon after releasing Rain Dogs , Tom threw himself into a new form of expression. In between a couple of arty film roles, he worked on expa...

Tom moved his new family to New York City, where he fell in with a set of unique musicians and recorded Rain Dogs . The album is nearly fla...

With a couple of years off, during which he married the love of his life, Tom Waits also found time to change labels and rethink his approac...

A few years after bankrupting himself by trying to recreate the Vietnam War in Apocalypse Now , Francis Ford Coppola decided to recoup his l...

For a man who went his own pointed way in the ‘70s, it was perhaps fitting that the first Tom Waits album of the ‘80s should be so schizophr...

Don’t be fooled by the opening notes of “Somewhere”, dutifully subtitled as being the song from West Side Story . Despite the syrupy strings...

Tom Waits’ capabilities as a storyteller continued on Foreign Affairs , which follows many of the approaches of Small Change . Drunken stumb...