A songwriter who turned barroom blues and carnival clatter into three decades of American stories.
If you need a place to start, try Tom Traubert's Blues for the early, wounded ballad side. For the later, clanging carnival sound, Starving In The Belly Of A Whale gives you the full picture.
Waits matters because he built a whole world out of that voice and those arrangements. You can hear it in Downtown Train, where a melody you could hum gets wrapped in that unmistakable growl. He writes about people most songwriters walk right past, and he makes you listen.
He started in LA clubs in the early '70s with records like Closing Time, full of piano ballads about loneliness. By the '80s, on albums like Swordfishtrombones, the sound had gotten rougher, filled with clattering percussion and characters from the margins. He's kept making records that way ever since, with a rotating crew of players.
Keep it compact: a lyric you come back to, a live memory, or the part of the catalog you would point someone toward first.
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