A01=Alex Harvey
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Asylum Records
Author_Alex Harvey
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Barney Hoskyns
Captain Beefheart
Category1=Non-Fiction
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Charles Bukowski
COP=United Kingdom
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Film noir
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Jackson Browne
Language_English
Nelson Algren
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Price_€10 to €20
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softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781789146639
- Dimensions: 148 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 15 Aug 2022
- Publisher: Reaktion Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits’s 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 LA's wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city’s literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes.
Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s 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.
Alex Harvey is a producer and director of programmes including Panorama and The Late Show for the BBC. His later films include The Lives of Animals (2002) and Enter the Jungle (2014). Based in Los Angeles, he regularly writes on literature, film and music for London Review of Books and LA Review of Books.
