Links

Long historico-biographical article on the career and habits of Tom Waits at the time of the release of the Frank’s Wild Years trilogy for its 40th anniversary reissue. Good summary of Waits’ work and influence and a timely reminder of these startlingly original and compelling recordings.

The article gets at something in Waits’ sound that reminds me of an interview with Keith Jarrett published by Ted Gioia where Jarrett talks about the essence of music he is grasping after, something unstructured and organic… Something intimated in the Waits article, in passages like this:

Ribot remembers how Waits would often be writing the lyrics moments before he sang them. “The groove was the main thing, which he would keep trying to communicate with the way he was moving his body and guitar.” As Richards recently said in an interview with Uncut: “[Tom] had a lot of rhythms going on in his head and in his body… the groove is another word for the grail. People search for it everywhere, and when you find it you hang on to it.”