Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles

Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits career, when he lived, wrote and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles; from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time (1973), to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones (1983). Starting his song-writing career in the 70s, Waits absorbed las wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the citys literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. Waits mined a rich seam of the citys 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 la as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations. See more