Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles

Song Noir explores Tom Waits' formative first decade in Los Angeles, where he wrote and recorded nine albums, blending jazz-blues rhythms with literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. He mined the city's low-life locations and characters, turning quotidian details into something more disturbing and emblematic.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 11 July 2022
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Song Noir delves into the transformative first decade of Tom Waits' career, encompassing his time in Los Angeles from 1973 to 1983. During this period, Waits wrote and recorded nine albums, showcasing a diverse range of musical styles. His debut album, Closing Time, featured a soft, folk-inflected sound, while his later works, such as Swordfishtrombones, embraced an abrasive, surreal style. Waits' song-writing career began in the 1970s, and he drew inspiration from the cultural influences of Los Angeles. He combined the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, creating hallucinatory dreamscapes that explored the city's literary and film noir traditions. Waits mined the city's low-life locations and characters, allowing the place to shape his dark imagination. He blended the domestic with the mythic, transforming everyday autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic, offering a vision of Los Angeles as the twisted and narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.

Dimension: 210 x 148 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781789146639