Background

Thomas Alan Waits was born on 7 December 1949 in Pomona, California. His father, Jesse Frank Waits, was a Texan of Scots-Irish ancestry, while his mother, Alma Waits, (of Norwegian heritage) was raised in Oregon.

Education

In 1968 Waits graduated from Hilltop High School in Chula Vista, California. He had learned to play piano and guitar, and during his high school years he performed in a rhythm-and-blues band called the Systems.

Career

After finishing school, Waits worked as a doorman at a San Diego nightclub, served briefly in the Coast Guard and continued to perform his music whenever and wherever he could. He moved to Los Angeles in 1971 and was signed to the Asylum record label in 1972. While living in his car or in cheap hotels, he recorded his first album, Closing Time, which was released in 1973. His contract with Asylum lasted through the 1970s and resulted in further recordings, including Small Change (1976) and the live album Nighthawks at the Diner (1975).

Waits's signature musical style was early established as an offbeat combination of old vaudeville tunes, blues, jazz and pop. Singing in his raspy, gravelly voice over an accompaniment of piano, guitar and strings, he narrated his dark, occasionally comical tales of misfits and loners living out desperate adventures in gritty urban settings.

Waits's work during the 1980s featured more eclectic musical arrangements, as he added keyboards and brass instruments to his orchestration. On albums like 1983's Swordfishtrombones and 1985's Rain Dogs, he was also increasingly influenced by additional musical genres, including cabaret, tango and European folk sources.

His recordings during the 1990s continued this experimental trend and were praised by critics. Bone Machine, released in 1992, and 1999's Mule Variations were both awarded Grammys. His 1998 compilation album Beautiful Maladies and the box set Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006) were also enthusiastically received. Although Waits has never produced chart hits or sold albums in record-breaking numbers, he has attracted a loyal audience and has become something of a musician's musician. His songs have been covered by artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Bruce Springsteen and Scarlett Johansson.

Waits has also appeared in more than two dozen motion pictures, beginning in 1978 with a small part in Paradise Alley. He was featured in several films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, including One from the Heart (1982) and The Cotton Club (1984). From the late 1980s into the 1990s, Waits lived in New York and acted more frequently, taking roles in such movies as Big Time, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Robert Altman's Short Cuts.

Waits's music has been featured in numerous films, including Night on Earth (1991), American Heart (1992), Dead Man Walking (1996) and Pollock (2000). He has also written music for theater, including the 1986 musical Frank's Wild Years and the songs and lyrics for The Black Rider, an avant-garde theater collaboration with director Robert Wilson and writer William S. Burroughs that premiered in 1990.

Achievements

• Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona with his trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock music styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music.
  
  In 2011, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
  
  He is included among the 2010 list of Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Singers, as well as the 2015 list of Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.

Works

More photos

• album

  • Closing Time
  • The Heart Of Saturday Night
  • Small Change
  • Foreign Affairs
  • Blue Valentine
  • Heartattack And Vine
  • Swordfishtrombones
  • Rain Dogs
  • Franks Wild Years
  • Bone Machine
  • The Black Rider
  • Mule Variations
  • Blood Money
  • Alice
  • Real Gone
  • Bad As Me

Religion

Waits doesn't have a religion and some of his comments point to agnosticism.

Views

Quotations: "If I exorcise my devils, well, my angels may leave too."

"And sometime around 2 AM you end up taking advantage of yourself. Ain't no way around that. Making a scene with a magazine."

"Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk."

"I'm so goddamn horny, the crack of dawn better be careful around me!"

"Your veal cutlet gets up off the plate, It walks down to end of the counter and beat the shit out of my cup of coffee. I guess the coffee just wasn't strong enough to defend itself."

"I don't have a drinking problem ‘cept when I can't get a drink."

"And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can forget, that history puts a saint in every dream."

"The piano has been drinking, not me."

"Come down off the cross, we can use the wood."

"And their mouths are cut like razor blades, and their eyes are like stilettos, and her radiator's steaming and her teeth are in a wreck, she won't let you kiss her, but what in the hell do you expect?"

"f you get far enough away you'll be on your way back home."

"The face forgives the mirror, the worm forgives the plough, the question begs the answer, can you forgive me somehow?"

"Some men are searching for the Holy Grail, but there ain't nothing sweeter than riding the rail."

"Well, you know when you're the opening act for large groups? Sometimes you feel like a rectal thermometer, you're going out there taking the temperature of the audience."

"Disneyland is Vegas for children."

"The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. It cheapens and degrades the human experience, when it should inspire and elevate."

Personality

Waits refused to sanction any biography of him. When Hoskyns was researching for a biography on Waits, Waits and his wife asked people not to talk to him.

During the 1970s, he was known as a heavy drinker and a smoker but avoided any drugs harder than cocaine. He told one interviewer that "I discovered alcohol at an early age, and that guided me a lot." Hoskyns also noted that Waits took a "grumpy attitude" towards touring.

Quotes from others about the person

• Humphries referred to him as "an essentially reticent man... reflective and surprisingly shy".

Connections

Waits lives in Sonoma County, California with his wife and frequent collaborator Kathleen Brennan (married August 1980) and their three children.

Father:

Jesse Frank Waits

Mother:

Alma Waits

Wife:

Kathleen Brennan

References

• Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters
• Tom Waits
• Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits