On the Genius of Tom Waits

Art should surprise us, not comfort us.

Happy Sunday, friends.

Recently I’ve been spending time with Waits / Corbijn—a terrific collaboration between the American songwriter/actor/performer Tom Waits and the renowned Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn. (Thank you Marcel Borgstijn for recommending this wonderful book!)

The book reminded me why Tom Waits has fascinated me for decades. Every photograph sent me back to his music, his films, his unforgettable television appearances, and the strange, beautiful world he has spent a lifetime creating.

My introduction to Waits wasn’t through music. It was through Jim Jarmusch’s film Down by Law.

I remember watching Waits on screen and thinking, Who the fuck is that? He didn’t seem to be acting. He didn’t even seem to be human. It’s like he has wandered in from another universe, one populated by drifters, bartenders, drunk hookers, French mimes, Russian poets, and people whose best days had long since passed.

That film led me to Rain Dogs, the first Tom Waits album I truly fell in love with. Most people discover an artist and follow them into the future. I worked backwards, uncovering the jazz-inflected troubadour of the 1970s before arriving at the fearless musical inventor he would become.

Tom Waits doesn’t simply write songs. He creates universes.

You can recognize a Tom Waits song within seconds. And it’s not just because of the famous “glue-and-sandpaper” voice, but because nobody else writes like him. His songs sound like they were written by Zeus, fermented in vodka brine, passed through the small intestine of a blind Uzbek mule, and landed in the brain of a monkey-looking boy from Northern California.

His characters wander through alleys, abandoned warehouses, circus tents, seedy bars, getting postcards from Minneapolis hookers, clapping hands and tangoing till they’re sore. They’re not celebrities or superheroes. They’re people most of us choose not to notice.

Musically, he refuses to be pinned down. Blues, jazz, vaudeville, gospel, polka, cabaret, rock, experimental noise. Metal pots, old deer bones, a brake drum, an out-of-tune accordion. Everything becomes part of his musical vocabulary. And a whisper always carries more weight than a scream.

Art should surprise us, not comfort us. Tom Waits has spent fifty years surprising us.

His friendship with Jim Jarmusch feels inevitable. Both artists are drawn to the overlooked and the forgotten. Their collaboration didn’t end with Down by Law. They reunited for Coffee and Cigarettes, and, decades later, for Father, Mother Sister Brother, which won the Golden Lion in August 2025 at Venice International Film Festival.

Neither artist seems interested in conventional storytelling. They invite us into worlds where mood matters as much as plot and where silence is often more eloquent than dialogue.

The same could be said of Anton Corbijn’s photographs. Corbijn isn’t interested in glamorous portraits. He photographs character. His images of Waits reveal a face that looks like a map of places one could only dream of visiting.

If you’ve never watched Tom Waits on David Letterman, do yourself a favor. Those appearances weren’t interviews. They were performance art.

His induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was no different. The acceptance speech was funny, self-effacing, surreal, and deeply moving. Then he performed, reminding us that authenticity never goes out of style.

Here’s his entire 2011 induction into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame (replete with the Neil Young introduction)

Tom Waits once quipped:

“A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordion, but doesn’t.”

He plays the accordion, of course. Or rather, he lets it become part of the language of his music, where it belongs alongside all the other beautiful, discarded sounds he has put together for us over the years.

That is his real gift. Not to invent new sounds, but to change what we think music is.

In April of 2026, The New York Times published a list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Tom Waits wasn’t on it. Those ignoramuses at the NYT deserve to listen to Taylor Swift for the rest of their lives, on repeat, in a windowless office, with a Spotify algorithm’s idea of variety.

Waits is 76. He stopped touring twenty years ago. His last album, Bad As Me, came out in 2011. It’s unlikely we’ll hear another song or see another performance from him.

This is his final appearance on Letterman before the show was retired two months later, in May of 2015.

I put together a playlist of my favorite Tom Waits songs for you. You’re welcome.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPE-rtwVvQA0&si=rWzmeGqwYUMr-2pe

Thanks for reading and being a subscriber.

‘Til next time.

ak