Tom Waits picked his 20 favourite albums of all time
FAROUT Magazine 2023
"For a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and a saw are to a carpenter. I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in – so the bootlegs I obtained in the sixties and seventies, where the noise and grit of the tapes became inseparable from the music, are essential to me.”
Tom Waits
Tom Waits’ 20 favourite albums:
In the Wee Small Hours – Frank Sinatra
Solo Monk – Thelonious Monk
Trout Mask Replica – Captain Beefheart
Exile On Main Street – The Rolling Stones
The Sinking of the Titanic – Gavin Bryers
The Basement Tapes – Bob Dylan
Lounge Lizards – Lounge Lizards
Rum Sodomy and the Lash – The Pogues
I’m Your Man – Leonard Cohen
The Specialty Sessions – Little Richard
Startime – James Brown
Bohemian-Moravian Bands – Texas-Czech
The Yellow Shark – Frank Zappa
Passion for Opera Aria
Rant in E Minor – Bill Hicks
Prison Songs: Murderous Home – Alan Lomax Collection
Cubanos Postizos – Marc Ribot
Houndog – Houndog
Purple Onion – Les Claypool
The Delivery Man – Elvis Costello
"Being inspired by Bob Dylan and The Beat Generation, Waits would later move to Los Angeles, where he signed his first recording contract with Asylum Records. The development of Waits’ sound would gradually move closer to rock, blues and experimental genres, so it was clear that he would cite Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart as an album that had a significant impact on his life.
“The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud,” Waits said of Beefheart’s album. “Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the centre of the earth, this is the high jump record that’ll never be beat, it’s a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more.”
Tue 31 October 2023 15:56, UK
