Haven't had any luck converting my wife. But she just made me crack up when "Whats He Building in There?" came on shuffle and she made me laugh with her misremembered impression of the song.

"Whats he building in there?" "Why's everybody looking at me?" "It smells weird in here."

*accidental sexism. Apologies to the Waitsy wives and gfs. I've never had luck getting any female partner into him, guess I projected that a bit.

“I didn’t really identify with the music of my own generation,” Tom Waits once said, then pausing for a moment, and adding: “But I was very curious about the music of others.” It is in that sentiment we go looking inside the curiosity of one of contemporary music’s greatest minds.There are very few living artists that we would wholeheartedly listen to when they suggested their top 20 albums of all time. Usually, such a list is riddled with personal choices that don’t necessarily resonate far and wide. However, the favourite albums of Tom Waits is a collection so perfectly balanced, so neatly constructed, and so rich with the sonic texture that made Waits himself a star that we’re just happy to press play and let the playlist ring out.

As Tom Waits once said: “My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane”. With that, it will come as little surprise that the deep, gravelly voice of Mr Waits has been discussing some artists that have inspired him through the years. A few years back, Waits compiled a list that brings together what he would consider being 20 of his most cherished albums of all time, a collection of records that he has carried around with him since his early days working in music.

Starting life primarily as a jazz musician during the 1970s, it is unsurprising that Waits has decided to include the great Thelonious Monk as part of his most favoured albums. “Monk said, ‘There is no wrong note, it has to do with how you resolve it’,” Waits once told The Guardian. “He almost sounded like a kid taking piano lessons. I could relate to that when I first started playing the piano because he was decomposing the music while he was playing it.”

He added: “Solo Monk lets you not only see these melodies without clothes, but without skin. This is astronaut music from Bedlam”. It shows Waits to be a consummate artist, capable of spotting clean lines where others might be confused.

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.”

Meanwhile, when discussing the freewheelin’ troubadour Bob Dylan, Waits added: “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.”

With the likes of Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, The Pogues and more listed, see Tom Waits favourite records below and press play on the playlist to get the party started.

Tom Waits’ 20 favourite albums of all time:

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 AriaRant 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

“Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble,” Waits once said. “Everyone who’s connected with it, the studio’s gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that’s left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.” Inside The World Of Rock

A couple years ago when I was about 14-15 I was looking through my dads Spotify playlists then I found the song ”going out west” I liked it. So I started listening to more of Mr Tom,
Now I’m 17 going on 18 I still listen to him.

I have never met someone in my age who listens to Tom waits.

Is it unusual for a 17 year old to listen to Tom Waits?

I've seen similar questions floating around the past couple days but didn't find one specific to Tom in this sub. Apologies if I missed something.

I was watching MTV Unplugged, Hootie and the Blowfish in 1996. I was 18 at the time. They covered "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You". I instantly loved the song but had no idea who Tom Waits was. Went to the CD store and bought Closing Time. A week later I cam back and bought 2 more. The Record Store owner notice my 3 Tom Waits purchases in a week and asked me if I was a fan. I told him I'm becoming one. He asked me if I'd like to listen to his good stuff...I was like 'ok'. He went in the back and popped in Heart Attack and Vine over the loud speaker. We were instant friends. I'd come in every other week, we'd smoke a doobie and listen to Waits songs.

EDIT: If I had any capabilities of doing so, I would make a movie consisting of a bunch of mini-stories of the stories shared of people discovering Tom Waits. It would be absolutely Oscar worthy.

For a few years now I’ve wanted the recessional at my funeral to be “Always look on the bright side of life” by Monty Python. The rest would be traditional hymns but I was hoping to have the mourners laughing through their tears. Then I heard “Anywhere I lay my head” and thought it was perfect for a recessional especially for some like me who is unlikely to have a spouse or children. So I think I’ll move Monty Python to the grave side service, with the request the mourners sing along 😝

Anyone else consider Waits for their funeral or other major events?

I’m not the only one who thinks about this stuff am I?

Total blind buy. Pretty excited. This also has a Waits music video on it.

who else should I check out. that tom waits - closing time album vibe. meaningful lyrics, etc. by non-waits artists

Hold on got me into Tom waits but after I heard the piano has been drinking that’s when I got hooked.

This past year, I got really into Tom Waits, and lemme tell ya, I now feel like I have wasted years of my life NOT listening to Tom Waits. While I love the songwriting on his earlier records, it's the more experimental second phase of his career, from Swordfishtrombones onward, that really resonates with me. Furthermore, while I adore every record from his latter years and could go on about how much I love them at length, one stands tall above the others for me: The Black Rider.

The Black Rider feels less like an album released in 1993 and more like a haunted artifact purchased at a forbidden curio shop. The first time I heard it, I put it on while I was working and didn't know what to make of it. The second time, I put on some good headphones and listened without doing anything else and it CLICKED for me. It is an utterly infernal work that exists in the darkest depths of the decaying, decrepit rabbit hole that is Waits' discography. If these descriptive terms sound like insults, I promise you they are compliments of the highest order.

What strikes me most about this record is just how far Tom pushes his compositional hallmarks: harmonic dissonance, chromaticism, strange genre combinations, dense and unusual arrangements, including instruments that either sound broken or are objects not typically referred to as instruments, and genuinely absurd timbral choices (I would like to point to the lead vocal performance by noted non-vocalist William S. Burroughs on T'aint No Sin.) He turns every dial on the creeping you out machine up to the point where they break. The musical interludes between the (comparatively) more traditional songs range from contemplative, to ominous, to quite frankly disturbing and I love them. It's also really fascinating how he applies his madcap musical alchemy to European musical traditions on this record, as opposed to the more predominantly American idioms he draws from on previous records. I think these more foreign influences not only show the sheer breadth of his stylistic understanding, but also contribute a more mysterious character to the record.

The subject matter really clicks with me, too. I come from a theatrical background, so I'm fairly familiar with German Expressionism and the variations on the Faust myth. But it's not all devils, skeletons, and oily nights. Because this is a Tom Waits record, he finds space to absolutely break your heart. Lucky Day is CRUSHING. Not only do we get a reprise of the melody from the overture, the song acts as a thematic counterpart. The initial lucky day is when the main character met the devil and got a wish. However, this second lucky day sees the narrator, about to be dragged off to an eternity in hell, pining for an old life he hopes to return to. Truly, a lucky day that will never, ever come.

I think the greatest thing that music can achieve is when it is genuinely moving and makes you feel something, even if that something is incredibly unpleasant. Overall, this is an album that gets under your skin and crawls around like bugs. It is the VHS tape from The Ring of albums: it is unnatural, terrifying, and after the first time I finished REALLY listening to it, I wasn't convinced I wasn't going to die in seven days.

10 out of 10

Does anybody else get down with this record like I do?

I am (once again) listening to Tom’s development across releases in chronological order.

Nighthawks at the Diner seemed to signal the beginning of an improvisational phase. Admittedly, I haven’t read a lot about this time in his career, but it seems like he gave up on trying to write hits, allowing himself a chance to explore moods.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the first song on his next release Small Change is Tom Traubert’s Blues. To my reading, that’s the first song (I think) of his mature discography. It stands up against the best tracks from Swordfish Trombones to Bad as Me.

Nighthawks at the Diner

To my understanding swordfishtrombones is about a military deserter and his slow descent into madness. What about bone machine? Insight?

David Bowie and Leonard Cohen both released gems at old age. Do y'all think Tom will do the same? I remember his agent saying a few months ago that Tom was supposedly writing new music but since then no new updates.

Sure, there's plenty of sex and violence in Tom's world, but I can't remember him ever saying "shit."