When Tom Waits came onto the music scene in the early 1970s, he was a golden-voiced, handsome piano player/crooner who wrote poetic songs that mixed lyrics and style like a bartender mixes spirits and ...

I was eight years old when I experienced my first Tom Waits song. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. Granted, at the age of eight, that wasn’t saying a lot, but the statement continues to ...

Tom Waits has released his performance of his 1976 song “Tom Traubert’s Blues” for the Italian docuseries Il Fattore Umano (The Human Factor), which aired earlier this year. Waits participated in the ...

Protest songs take on a variety of forms. Songwriters can go the direct route and call out the issues that they want to tackle in their lyrics. The tricky part with this method is that the emotions of ...

Tom Waits doesn't tour a lot, and when he does, tickets are hard to come by. But you can hear the final U.S. concert from Waits' most recent tour here, or download the show by subscribing to the All ...

In 1999, scraggly-voiced junkyard wizard Tom Waits released Mule Variations, his first album in six years. The big punk label Epitaph started its offshoot imprint Anti- specifically to release Mule ...

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the singer-songwriter’s inimitable 1985 album, a ...

Often referred to as that gravelly-voiced musician who sounds like he’s been gargling razor blades with a whiskey chaser, Tom Waits is without a doubt one of the defining musicians of the late 20th ...

March 9 -- "I don't have the words to describe what went down," veteran blues singer and guitarist John Hammond says of the recording of his new album, Wicked Grin, which will be released on ...

Tom Waits works entirely on his own terms. Since 2011’s Bad As Me, he’s been extremely selective in his public appearances and new material; we’re lucky to get an anniversary reissue or film cameo ...