Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles [Paperback]

A gritty, smoke-filled, and boozy account of musician Tom Waits’s formative decade in Los Angeles.
 
Song Noirexamines the formative first decade of Tom Waits’s career, when he lived, wrote, and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles: from his soft, folk-inflected debut,Closing Timein 1973, to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombonesin 1983. Starting his songwriting career in the seventies, Waits absorbed Los Angeles’s wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city’s literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. Mixing the domestic with the mythic, Waits turned quotidian, autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic, a vision of Los Angeles as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.Alex Harveyis a producer and director of programs includingPanoramaandThe Late Showfor the BBC. His films includeThe Lives of AnimalsandEnter the Jungle. Based in Los Angeles, he regularly writes on literature, film, and music for theLondon Review of BooksandLos Angeles Review of Books.