Childhood and adolescence: 1949–1968 in
Chula Vista, California in 1967. He dropped out at the age of 18. Thomas Alan Waits was born on December 7, 1949, in
Pomona, California. He has one older and one younger sister. His father, Jesse Frank Waits, was a
Texas native of Scots-Irish descent, and his mother, Alma Fern (née Johnson), hailed from
Oregon and had Norwegian ancestry. Alma, a regular church-goer, managed the household. Jesse taught Spanish at a local school and was an alcoholic; Waits later related that his father was "a tough one, always an outsider." They lived at 318 North Pickering Avenue in
Whittier, California. He recalled having a "very middle-class" upbringing and "a pretty normal childhood". He attended Jordan Elementary School, where he was bullied. There, he learned to play the
bugle and
guitar. His father taught him to play the
ukulele. During the summers, he visited maternal relatives in
Gridley and
Marysville, both in California. He later recalled that it was an uncle's raspy, gravelly timbre that inspired his own singing voice. In 1959, his parents separated and his father moved away from the family home, a traumatic experience for the 10-year-old Waits. Alma took her children and relocated to
Chula Vista, a middle-class suburb of
San Diego. Jesse visited the family there, taking his children on trips to
Tijuana. In nearby
Southeast San Diego, Waits attended
O'Farrell Community School, where he fronted a school band, the Systems, which he described as "white kids trying to get that
Motown sound." He developed a love of
R&B and
soul singers like
Ray Charles and
Wilson Pickett, as well as
country music and
Roy Orbison.
Bob Dylan later became an inspiration; Waits placed transcriptions of Dylan's lyrics on his bedroom walls. Waits recalls: "I was fifteen and I snuck in to see
Lightnin' Hopkins. Amazing show. Every time he opened his mouth he had that orchestra of gold teeth, and I was devastated... He walked through a door, and slammed the door behind him, and on the door it said, I swear to God, 'KEEP OUT. This room is for entertainers ONLY.' And I knew, at that moment, that I had to get into show business as soon as possible." He recalls: "I first saw
James Brown in 1962 at an outdoor theatre in San Diego and it was indescribable ... it was like putting a finger in a light socket... It was really like seeing mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Christmas." By the time he was studying at
Hilltop High School in
Chula Vista, California, he later said he was "kind of an amateur juvenile delinquent", interested in "malicious mischief" and breaking the law. He later said that he was a "rebel against the rebels", eschewing the
hippie subculture which was growing in popularity for the 1950s
Beat generation, especially
Jack Kerouac,
Allen Ginsberg, and
William S. Burroughs. In 1968, at age 18, Waits dropped out of high school. He was an avid watcher of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents and
The Twilight Zone. Another influence was the comedian
Lenny Bruce. Waits worked at Napoleone's pizza restaurant in
National City, California, and both there and at a local diner developed an interest in the lives of the patrons, writing down phrases and snippets of dialogue he overheard. He worked in the forestry service as a fireman for three years and served with the
U.S. Coast Guard. He enrolled at
Southwestern Community College in Chula Vista to study photography, for a time considering a career in the field. He continued pursuing his musical interests, taking piano lessons. He began frequenting venues around San Diego, being drawn into the city's
folk scene.
Early musical career: 1969–1976 in
West Hollywood, where Waits's performances brought him to the attention of
Herb Cohen and
David Geffen In 1969, he was hired as an occasional doorman for the Heritage coffeehouse, which held regular performances from folk musicians. He began to sing at the Heritage; his set initially consisted largely of covers of Dylan and
Red Sovine's "
Phantom 309". In time, he performed his own material as well, often parodies of country songs or bittersweet ballads influenced by his relationships; these included early songs "
Ol' 55" and "I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love With You". As his reputation grew, he played at other San Diego venues, supporting acts like
Tim Buckley,
Sonny Terry,
Brownie McGhee, and his friend
Jack Tempchin. Aware that San Diego offered little opportunity for career progression, Waits began traveling into Los Angeles to play at the
Troubadour in
West Hollywood. It was there, in the autumn of 1971, that Waits came to the attention of
Herb Cohen, who signed him to publishing and recording contracts. The recordings that were produced under that recording agreement were eventually released in the early 1990s as
The Early Years and
The Early Years, Volume Two. In early 1972, after quitting his job at Napoleone's to concentrate on his songwriting career, Waits moved to an apartment in
Silver Lake, Los Angeles, a poor neighborhood known for its Hispanic and
bohemian communities. He continued performing at the Troubadour and there met
David Geffen, who gave Waits a recording contract with his
Asylum Records.
Jerry Yester was chosen to produce his first album, with the recording sessions taking place in Hollywood's
Sunset Sound studios. The album,
Closing Time, was released in March 1973 although it attracted little attention and did not sell well. Biographer
Barney Hoskyns noted that
Closing Time was "broadly in step with the singer-songwriter school of the early 1970s"; Waits had wanted to create a piano-led jazz album although Yester had pushed its sound in a more folk-oriented direction. Buckley covered "Martha" on his album
Sefronia later that year. An
Eagles recording of "Ol' 55" on their album
On the Border brought Waits further money and recognition, although he regarded their version as "a little antiseptic". To promote his debut, Waits and a three-piece band embarked on a U.S. tour, where he was the supporting act for more established artists. He supported
Tom Rush at
Washington D.C.'s
The Cellar Door,
Danny O'Keefe in
Cambridge, Massachusetts's
Club Passim,
Charlie Rich at
New York City's
Max's Kansas City,
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in
East Lansing, Michigan, and
John P. Hammond in
San Francisco. Waits returned to Los Angeles in June, feeling demoralized about his career. That month, he was the cover star of free music magazine
Music World. He began composing songs for his second album, and attended the
Venice Poetry Workshop to try out this new material in front of an audience. Although Waits was eager to record this new material, Cohen instead convinced him to take over as a support act for
Frank Zappa's
the Mothers of Invention after previous support act Kathy Dalton pulled out due to the hostility from Zappa's fans. Waits joined Zappa's tour in
Ontario, but like Dalton found the audiences hostile; while on stage he was jeered at and pelted with fruit. Although he liked the Mothers of Invention, he was intimidated by Zappa himself. (pictured here in 1981) and collaborated with her on the song "I Never Talk to Strangers". Waits moved from Silver Lake to
Echo Park, spending much of his time in
downtown Los Angeles. In early 1974, he continued to perform around the West Coast, getting as far as
Denver. For Waits's second album, Geffen wanted a more jazz-oriented producer, selecting
Bones Howe for the job. Howe recounts his first encounter with the young artist: "I told him I thought his music and lyrics had a
Kerouac quality to them, and he was blown away that I knew who Jack Kerouac was. I told him I also played jazz drums and he went wild. Then I told him that when I was working for
Norman Granz, Norman had found these tapes of Kerouac reading his poetry from The Beat Generation in a hotel room. I told Waits I'd make him a copy. That sealed it." Recording sessions for
The Heart of Saturday Night took place at
Wally Heider's Studio 3 on
Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood in April and May, with Waits conceptualizing the album as a sequence of songs about U.S. nightlife. The album was far more widely reviewed than
Closing Time had been. Waits himself later dismissed the album as "very ill-formed, but I was trying". After recording
The Heart of Saturday Night, Waits reluctantly agreed to tour with Zappa again, but once more faced strong audience hostility. The kudos of having supported Zappa's tour nevertheless bolstered his image in the music industry and helped his career. In October 1974, he first performed as the headline act before touring the East Coast; in New York City he met and befriended
Bette Midler, with whom he had a sporadic affair. Back in Los Angeles, Cohen suggested Waits produce a
live album. To this end, he performed two shows at the
Record Plant Studio in front of a small invited audience to recreate the atmosphere of a
jazz club. Again produced and engineered by Howe (as all his future Asylum releases would be), it was released as
Nighthawks at the Diner in October 1975. The album cover and title were inspired by
Edward Hopper's
Nighthawks (1942). He followed this with a week's residency at the Reno Sweeney nightclub, an off-Broadway–style club in New York City. In December he appeared on the
PBS concert show
Soundstage. From March to May 1976, he toured the U.S., telling interviewers that the experience was tough and that he was drinking too much alcohol. In May, he embarked on his first tour of Europe, performing in
London,
Amsterdam,
Brussels and
Copenhagen. On his return to Los Angeles, he joined his friend
Chuck E. Weiss, moving into the
Tropicana Motel in
West Hollywood, which had an established reputation in rock music circles. Visitors noted his two-room apartment there was heavily cluttered. Waits told the
Los Angeles Times that "You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty".
Small Change and Foreign Affairs: 1976–1978 In July 1976, Waits recorded
Small Change, again produced by Howe. He recalled it as a seminal episode in his development as a songwriter, the point when he became "completely confident in the craft". The album was critically well received and was his first release to break into the
Billboard Top 100 Album List, peaking at 89. Per Bowman,
Small Change "made it clear that Waits had evolved into a master storyteller, reflecting the influence of crime-noir writers such as
Dashiell Hammett and
John D. MacDonald. Arguably his first masterpiece, the album featured exquisite piano ballads such as '
Tom Traubert's Blues' and '
The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me),' the word-jazz of ‘Pasties and a G-String,’ and the tour-de-force tenor-sax-accompanied hucksterism of '
Step Right Up. Jones's musical career was taking off; after an appearance on
Saturday Night Live, "Chuck E.'s In Love" reached number 4 in the singles chart, straining her relationship with Waits. Their relationship was further damaged by Jones's
heroin addiction. Waits joined Jones for the first leg of her European tour, but then ended his relationship with her. Her grief at the breakup was channeled into the 1981 album
Pirates. In September, Waits moved to
Crenshaw Boulevard to be closer to his father, before deciding to relocate to New York City. He initially lived in the
Chelsea Hotel before renting an apartment on West 26th Street. On arriving in the city, he told a reporter that he "just needed a new urban landscape. I've always wanted to live here. It's a good working atmosphere for me". He considered writing a
Broadway musical based on
Thornton Wilder's
Our Town. A
rotoscoped Waits performed "The One That Got Away" in the music video
Tom Waits For No One (1979).
Francis Ford Coppola asked Waits to return to Los Angeles to write a soundtrack for his forthcoming film,
One from the Heart. Waits was excited, but conflicted, by the prospect; Coppola wanted him to create music akin to his early work, a genre that he was trying to leave behind, and thus he characterized the project as an artistic "step backwards". He nevertheless returned to Los Angeles to work on the soundtrack in a room set aside for the purpose in Coppola's Hollywood studios. This style of working was new to Waits; he later recalled that he was "so insecure when I started ... I was sweating buckets". Waits was nominated for the 1982
Academy Award for Original Music Score. Waits still contractually owed Elektra-Asylum another album, so took a break from Coppola's project to write an album that he initially called
White Spades. He recorded the album in June; it was released in September as
Heartattack and Vine. The album was more guitar-based and had, according to Humphries, "a harder R&B edge" than any of its predecessors. It again broke into the Top 100 Album Chart, peaking at number 96. Reviews were generally good. Hoskyns called it "one of Waits's pinnacle achievements" as an album. One of its tracks, "
Jersey Girl", was subsequently recorded by
Bruce Springsteen. Waits was grateful, both for the revenue that the cover brought him and because he felt appreciated by a songwriter he admired. While on the set of
One from the Heart, Waits encountered
Kathleen Brennan, a young
Irish-American woman working as an assistant story editor. The two had previously met while Waits was filming
Paradise Alley. Waits would later describe this encounter with Brennan as "love at first sight"; they were engaged to be married within a week. In August 1980, they married at a 24-hour wedding chapel on
Manchester Boulevard in
Watts before honeymooning in
Tralee, a town in
County Kerry, Ireland, where Brennan had family.
Swordfishtrombones and New York City: 1980–1984 Returning to Los Angeles, Waits and Brennan moved into a Union Avenue apartment. Hoskyns noted that with Brennan, "Waits had found the stabilizing, nurturing companion he'd always wanted", and that she brought him "a sense of emotional security he had never known" before. At the same time, many of his old friends felt cut off after his marriage. Waits said of Brennan: "She rescued me. Maybe I rescued her too; that's often how it works. Upshot is that we both got into the same leaky boat. Maybe the weight drags it down, because now you've two people sitting in it. Sorry, baby! But on the other hand you've also got two peoples' imagination to patch it up again. Everybody knows she's the brains behind Pa, as Dylan might have said. I'm just the figurehead. She's the one who's steering the ship." Recording of Waits's
One from the Heart soundtrack began in October 1980 and continued until September 1981. A number of the tracks were recorded as duets with
Crystal Gayle; Waits had initially planned to duet with Midler but she proved unavailable. The film was released in 1982, to largely poor reviews. Waits makes a small cameo as a trumpet player in a crowd scene. Waits's
soundtrack album was released by
Columbia Records in 1982. Waits had misgivings about the album, thinking it over-produced. Humphries thought that working with Coppola was an important move in Waits's career: it "led directly to Waits moving from cult (i.e. largely unknown) artiste to center-stage." (pictured in 2013). Newly married and with his Elektra-Asylum contract completed, Waits decided that it was time to artistically reinvent himself. He wanted to move away from using Howe as his producer, although the two parted on good terms. With Brennan's help, he began the process of firing Cohen as his manager, with him and Brennan taking on managerial responsibilities themselves. He came to believe that Cohen had been swindling him out of much of his earnings, later relating that "I thought I was a millionaire and it turned out I had, like, twenty bucks." Waits credited Brennan with introducing him to much new music, most notably
Captain Beefheart, a key influence on the direction in which he wanted to take his work. He later said that "once you've heard Beefheart it's hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood." She also introduced him to
Harry Partch, a composer who created his own instruments out of everyday materials. Waits began to use images rather than moods or characters as the basis for his songs. Waits wrote the songs for
Swordfishtrombones during a two-week trip to Ireland. He recorded it at Sunset Sound studios and produced it himself; Brennan often attended the sessions and gave him advice.
Swordfishtrombones abandoned the jazz sound characteristic of his earlier work; it was his first album not to feature a saxophone and his first to feature the
marimba. When the album was finished, he took it to Asylum, but they declined to release it. Waits wanted to leave the label; in his view, "They liked dropping my name in terms of me being a 'prestige' artist, but when it came down to it they didn't invest a whole lot in me in terms of faith".
Chris Blackwell of
Island Records learned of Waits' dissatisfaction and approached him, offering to release
Swordfishtrombones; Island had a reputation for signing more experimental acts, such as
King Crimson,
Roxy Music and
Sparks. Waits did not tour to promote the album, partly because Brennan was pregnant. Although unenthusiastic about the new trend for
music videos, he appeared in one for the song "
In the Neighborhood", co-directed by
Haskell Wexler and
Michael A. Russ. Russ also designed the
Swordfishtrombones album cover, featuring an image of Waits with
Lee Kolima, a circus strongman, and
Angelo Rossitto, a dwarf.
Jon Pareles wrote that "On
Swordfishtrombones, Waits has made a breakthrough–he's found music as evocative as his words. Waits's grumble of a voice now bounces off a peculiar assortment of horns and percussion and organ and keyboards, as if he'd led a Salvation Army band into a broken-down Hong Kong disco. It's as if he's shifted from monologues to screenplays." According to David Smay,
Swordfishtrombones was "the record where Tom Waits radically reinvented himself and reshaped the musical landscape."
NME named it the second best album of the year. In 1989,
Spin magazine named it the second greatest album of all time. In 1983, Waits appeared in three more Coppola films: as Benny, a philosopher running a billboard store in
Rumble Fish; as Buck Merrill in
The Outsiders; and as the maître'd in
The Cotton Club. He later said that "Coppola is actually the only film director in Hollywood that has a conscience... most of them are egomaniacs and money-grabbing bastards". In September, Brennan gave birth to their daughter, Kellesimone. Waits was determined to keep his family life separate from his public image and to spend as much time as possible with his daughter. With Brennan and their child, Waits moved to New York City to be closer to Brennan's parents and Island's U.S. office. They settled into a loft apartment near
Union Square. Waits found New York City life frustrating, although it allowed him to meet many new musicians and artists. He befriended
John Lurie of
the Lounge Lizards, and the duo began sharing a music studio in the Westbeth artist-community building in
Greenwich Village. He began networking in the city's arts scene, and, at a party
Jean-Michel Basquiat held for Lurie, he met the filmmaker
Jim Jarmusch.
Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years: 1985–1988 (pictured in 2013). Starting in the mid-'80s,
Kurt Weill became an important influence on Waits's work. Bowman writes that "Waits had become interested in Weill's late-1920s and 1930s musical-theater works... Weill's slightly off-kilter, stylized
cabaret approach to melody, rhythm, orchestration, and musical narrative permeated much of Waits' later work." Waits did the soundtrack for the documentary
Streetwise, about homeless youth in Seattle; it was another influence on the subjects of his next album.
Rain Dogs was recorded at the
RCA Studios in mid 1985. Musically, Waits called the album "kind of an interaction between Appalachia and Nigeria".
Keith Richards played on several tracks; Richards later acknowledged Waits's encouragement of his debut solo album,
Talk is Cheap.
Rain Dogs also marked
Marc Ribot's debut as a session guitarist; he played on many later Waits albums.
Jean-Baptiste Mondino directed a music video of "
Downtown Train" featuring boxer
Jake LaMotta. The song was subsequently covered by
Patty Smyth in 1987, and later by
Rod Stewart, where it reached the top five in 1990. In 1985,
Rolling Stone named Waits its "Songwriter of the Year". Arion Berger wrote that "With
Rain Dogs, he dropped his bedraggled lounge-piano act and fused outsider influences–socialist decadence by way of Kurt Weill, pre-rock integrity from old
dirty blues, the elegiac melancholy of
New Orleans funeral brass–into a singularly idiosyncratic American style... The music is bony and menacingly beautiful, the desultory electric-guitar solo as cold as the rattle of marimbas in 'Clap Hands'. The evocative, elliptical rhymes describe scenes and characters with poetic precision but use atmosphere, not narrative, to connect them."
NME named
Rain Dogs the best album of the year. In September 1985, his son Casey was born. Waits assembled a band and went on tour, kicking it off in Scotland in October before proceeding around Europe and then the U.S. He changed the setlist for each performance; most of the songs chosen were from his two Island albums. Returning to the U.S., he traveled to
New Orleans to act in Jarmusch's
Down by Law. Jarmusch wrote
Down by Law with Waits and Lurie in mind. The film opened and closed with songs from
Rain Dogs. Jarmusch noted that "Tom and I have a kindred aesthetic. An interest in unambitious people, marginal people." The pair developed a friendship; Waits called Jarmusch "Dr. Sullen", while Jarmusch called Waits "The Prince of Melancholy". Waits had devised a musical,
Franks Wild Years, loosely based on "Frank's Wild Years" from
Swordfishtrombones. In late 1985, he reached an agreement that the play would be performed by the
Steppenwolf Theatre Company in
Chicago's
Briar Street Theatre Waits starred as Frank, whom he described as Quite a guy. Grew up in a bird's eye frozen, oven-ready, rural American town where
Bing,
Bob,
Dean,
Wayne &
Jerry are considered major constellations. Frank, mistakenly, thinks he can stuff himself into their shorts and present himself to an adoring world. He is a combination of
Will Rogers and
Mark Twain, playing accordion–but without the wisdom they possessed. He has a poet's heart and a boy's sense of wonder with the world. A legend in Rainville since he burned his house down and took off for the Big Time. Reviews were generally positive. He had initially considered a run in New York City but decided against it. The songs from the show were recorded for his ninth studio album,
Franks Wild Years, and released by
Island Records in 1987.
NME ranked
Franks Wild Years fifth on its list of albums of the year. The album was Waits's first collaboration with
David Hidalgo, who played accordion on "Cold, Cold Ground" and "Train Song". After its release, Waits toured North America and Europe, his last full tour for two decades. Two of the performances were the basis for Chris Blum's concert film
Big Time (1988). Waits continued interacting and working with other artists he admired. He was a great fan of
The Pogues and went on a Chicago
pub crawl with them in 1986. In 1987, he appeared as a master of ceremonies on several dates of
Elvis Costello's "Wheel of Fortune" tour. In 1986, he took a small part in
Candy Mountain, as millionaire golf enthusiast Al Silk. He costarred in
Hector Babenco's
Ironweed, as Rudy the Kraut. Hoskyns noted that
Ironweed put Waits "on the mainstream Hollywood map as a character actor". In Fall 1987, Waits and his family left New York and returned to Los Angeles, settling on Union Avenue. He appeared as a hitman in
Robert Dornhelm's
Cold Feet and lent his voice to Jarmusch's
Mystery Train. Although Waits had provided a voice-over for a 1981 television advert for Butcher's Blend dog food, he objected to musicians letting companies use their songs in advertising; he said that "artists who take money for ads poison and pervert their songs". In November 1988, he brought a lawsuit against
Frito-Lay for using an impersonator performing "Step Right Up" in an advertisement for
Doritos; it came to court in April 1990, and Waits won the case in 1992. He received a $2.6 million settlement, a sum larger than his earnings from all of his previous albums combined. This earned him and Brennan reputations as tireless adversaries.
The Black Rider, Bone Machine, and Alice: 1989–1998 In 1989, Waits began planning a collaboration with
Robert Wilson, a theater director he had known throughout the 1980s. Their project was the "cowboy opera"
The Black Rider. It was based on a German folk tale, the
Freischütz, which had inspired
Carl Maria von Weber's opera
Der Freischütz (1821). In 2004, Waits related that "Wilson is my teacher. There's nobody that's affected me that much as an artist". Waits wrote the music and, at the suggestion of
Allen Ginsberg, Waits and Wilson approached
William S. Burroughs to pen the lyrics. They flew to
Kansas to meet with Burroughs, who agreed to join the project. Waits traveled to
Hamburg, Germany in May 1989 to work on the project, and was later joined there by Burroughs.
The Black Rider debuted in Hamburg's
Thalia Theater in March 1990. On completing its run at the Thalia, the play went on an international tour, with a second run of performances occurring in the mid-2000s. In June 1989, Waits traveled to London to play a
Punch and Judy puppeteer in Ann Guedes's film
Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale. He proceeded to
Ireland, where he was joined by Brennan and spent time with her family. In December 1989, he began a stint as Curly, a mobster's son, at the
Los Angeles Theatre Center production of
Thomas Babe's play
Demon Wine. Over the next four years, he made seven film appearances. He nevertheless repeatedly told press that he did not see himself as an actor, but only as someone who did some acting. He made a brief appearance as a plainclothes cop in
The Two Jakes (1990) and played a disabled war veteran in
Terry Gilliam's
The Fisher King (1991). He had a cameo in
Steve Rash's
Queens Logic (1991) and played a pilot-for-hire in
Héctor Babenco's
At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991). Waits's family later moved to a secluded house near
Valley Ford after a bypass road was built near to their first Sonoma County house. Also in 1991, 13 of Waits's 1971 pre-Asylum Records recordings were released for the first time on the first volume of
Tom Waits: The Early Years. Waits was angered at this, describing many of his early demos as "baby pictures" that he would not want released. A second volume with 13 more recordings from 1971 was released in 1993. In April 1992, Waits released the soundtrack album to Jarmusch's
Night on Earth. Largely instrumental, it had been recorded at the Prairie Sun studio in
Cotati. In 1992, Waits quit drinking alcohol and joined
Alcoholics Anonymous. In the early 1990s he took part in several charitable causes. In 1990 he contributed a song to the
HIV/AIDS benefit album
Red Hot + Blue and later appeared at a
Wiltern Theater fundraising show for the victims of the
1992 Los Angeles riots. in
Hamburg, where
The Black Rider and
Alice were first performed In August 1992, Waits released his tenth studio album,
Bone Machine. Waits wanted to explore "more machinery sounds" with the album, reflecting his interest in
industrial music. It was recorded in an old storage room at Prairie Sun. Waits recalled, "I found a great room to work in, it's just a cement floor and a hot water heater. Okay, we'll do it here. It's got some good echo." Eight of the album's tracks were co-written with Brennan. The cover was co-designed by Waits and
Jesse Dylan. Jarmusch and Dylan directed videos for "I Don't Wanna Grow Up", and "Goin' Out West", respectively. Critic Steve Huey called it "perhaps Tom Waits's most cohesive album... a morbid, sinister nightmare, one that applied the quirks of his experimental '80s classics to stunningly evocative—and often harrowing—effect... Waits's most affecting and powerful recording, even if it isn't his most accessible." The album's closing track, "That Feel", was co-written with
Keith Richards.
Bone Machine won the
Grammy for
Best Alternative Music Album; in response, Waits asked Jarmusch: "alternative to
what?!" Waits decided to record an album of the songs written for
The Black Rider, and did so at Los Angeles's
Sunset Sound Factory.
The Black Rider was released in the fall of 1993. Waits and Wilson decided to collaborate again, this time on an operatic treatment of
Lewis Carroll's relationship with
Alice Liddell, who had provided the inspiration for
Alice in Wonderland and
Through the Looking Glass. Again scheduled to premier at the Thalia, they began working on the project in Hamburg in early 1992. Waits characterized the songs he wrote for the play as "adult songs for children, or children's songs for adults". In his lyrics, Waits drew on his increasing interest in
freak shows and the physically deformed. He thought the play itself was about "repression, mental illness and obsessive, compulsive disorders".
Alice premiered at the Thalia in December 1992. In early 1993, Brennan was pregnant with Waits's third child, Sullivan. He decided to reduce his workload so as to spend more time with his children; this isolation spawned rumours that he was seriously ill or had separated from his wife. For three years, he turned down all offers to perform gigs or appear in movies. However, he made several cameos and guest appearances on albums by musicians he admired. In February 1996, he held a benefit performance to raise funds for the legal defense of his friend Don Hyde, who had been charged with distributing
LSD. He wrote "Walk Away" and "The Fall of Troy" for
the soundtrack of
Dead Man Walking (1995) and "Little Drop of Poison" for
The End of Violence (1997). In 1998, Island released
Beautiful Maladies, a compilation of 23 Waits tracks from his albums with the company, selected by Waits himself.
Mule Variations and Woyzeck: 1999–2003 in
Austin, Texas. After his contract with Island expired, Waits decided not to try to renew it, particularly as Blackwell had resigned from the company. He signed to a smaller record label,
Anti-, recently launched as an offshoot of the
punk-label
Epitaph Records. He described the company as "a friendly place". The president of Anti-,
Andy Kaulkin, said the label was "blown away that Tom would even consider us. We are huge fans." Waits himself praised the label: "Epitaph is a label run by and for artists and musicians, where it feels much more like a partnership than a plantation... We shook on the deal over a coffee in a truck stop. I know it's going to be an adventure." In March 1999, Anti- released
Mule Variations. Waits had been recording the tracks at Prairie Sun since June 1998. The tracks often dealt with themes involving rural life in the United States and were influenced by the early blues recordings made by
Alan Lomax; Waits coined the term "surrural" ("surreal" and "rural") to describe the album's content.
Mule Variations reached number 30 on the U.S. Billboard 200, the highest showing of a Waits album. The album was well received, being named "Album of the Year" by
Mojo. It won the
Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. On the categorization of the album as
folk music, Waits said: "That's not a bad thing to be called if you've got to be in some kind of category." Also in March 1999, Waits gave his first live show in three years at
Paramount Theater, Austin, Texas as part of the
South by Southwest festival. He then appeared in an episode of
VH1 Storytellers. In the later part of the year he embarked on the
Mule Variations tour, primarily in the U.S. but also featuring dates in Berlin. In October, he performed at
Neil Young's annual
Bridge School benefit concert. In 1999, he appeared in
Kinka Usher's comic book spoof
Mystery Men as Dr A. Heller, an eccentric inventor living in an abandoned amusement park. In 2000, Waits began writing songs for Wilson's adaptation of
Georg Büchner's
Woyzeck, which had earlier inspired
Alban Berg's opera
Wozzeck (1925). It was scheduled to start at the Betty Nansen Theater in
Copenhagen in November 2000. He initially worked on the songs at home before traveling to Copenhagen for rehearsals in October. Waits said that he liked the play because it was "a proletariat story ... about a poor soldier who is manipulated by the government". He decided to then record the songs he had written for both
Alice and
Woyzeck, placing them on separate albums. For these recordings, he brought in a range of jazz and avant-garde musicians from San Francisco. The two albums,
Alice and
Blood Money, were released simultaneously in May 2002.
Alice entered the U.S. album chart at number 32 and
Blood Money at number 33, his highest charting positions at that time. Waits described
Alice as being "more metaphysical or something, maybe more water, more feminine", while
Blood Money was "more earthbound, more carnival, more the slaving meat-wheel that we're all on". Of the two,
Alice was better received by critics. Jesse Dylan directed a video for "God's Away On Business", but shooting was delayed when the
emus who were set to star were eaten by coyotes. Per
NME, "Replacements were hastily found and the video for ‘God’s Away On Business’, the single lifted from ‘Blood Money’, one of Waits’ two new albums, went ahead a little late." In May 2001, Waits accepted a Founders Award at the 18th annual
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Pop Music Awards in a ceremony at the
Beverly Hilton Hotel in
Beverly Hills, California. That same month, he joined singers
Nancy and
Ann Wilson of
Heart, as well as
Randy Newman, in launching a $40 million lawsuit against
mp3.com for copyright infringement. In September 2002, he appeared at a hearing on accounting practices within the music industry in California. There, he expressed satisfaction with Anti- but declared more broadly that "the record companies are like cartels. It's a nightmare to be trapped in one." In September 2003, Waits performed at the Healing the Divide fundraiser in New York City. He appeared in Jarmusch's
Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), having a conversation with
Iggy Pop.
Real Gone and Orphans: 2004–2011 on his
Glitter and Doom Tour, July 2008 In 2004, Waits released his fifteenth studio album,
Real Gone. He had recorded it in an abandoned schoolhouse in
Locke. Hoskyns called the album Waits' "roughest, most unkempt music to date". It incorporated Waits
beatboxing, a technique he had picked up from his growing interest in
hip hop. Humphries characterized it as "the most overtly political album of Waits' career". It featured three political songs expressing Waits' anger at the presidency of
George W. Bush and the
Iraq War. He said: "I'm not a politician. I keep my mouth shut because I don't want to put my foot in it. But at a certain point, saying absolutely nothing is a political statement of its own."
Real Gone received largely positive reviews. It made the Billboard Top 30 as well as the Top 10 in several European album charts, also earning him a nomination for Best International Male Solo Artist at the 2005
Brit Awards. In October 2004, he launched a tour in
Vancouver before heading to Europe, where his shows were sell-outs: his only London gig saw 78,000 applications for around 3,700 available tickets. Per Bowman, "Much of
Real Gone was built around oral-percussion home recordings that Waits made in his bathroom, using his mouth as a human beat-box. A superb example is the bed track underpinning the hellacious groove of ‘Metropolitan Glide’ that Waits aptly described as ‘cubist funk.’ In stark contrast, the album's closing track, 'Day After Tomorrow,' returned Waits to his singer-songwriter roots, and features a beautiful melody that sounds eerily similar to Dylan's early acoustic work." at the premiere for
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at the 2009
Toronto International Film Festival In January 2008, Waits performed at a benefit for Bet Tzedek Legal Services—The House of Justice, a
nonprofit poverty law center, in Los Angeles. That year, Waits embarked on his
Glitter and Doom Tour, starting in the U.S. and moving to Europe. Both of his sons played with him on the tour. At the June concert in
El Paso, Texas, Waits was presented with the key to the city. In 2009, he released the two-disc
Glitter and Doom Live. He continued acting, playing Mr Nick in Gilliam's
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) and Engineer in
The Book of Eli (2010), a
post-apocalyptic film by the
Hughes brothers. Waits found himself in a situation similar to his earlier one with Frito Lay in 2000 when
Audi approached him, asking to use "Innocent When You Dream" for a commercial broadcast in Spain. Waits declined, but the commercial ultimately featured music very similar to that song. Waits undertook legal action, and a Spanish court recognized that there had been a violation of Waits's
moral rights in addition to the infringement of copyright. The production company, Tandem Campmany Guasch, was ordered to pay compensation to Waits through his Spanish publisher. Waits later joked that they got the name of the song wrong, thinking it was called "Innocent When You Scheme". In 2005, Waits sued
Adam Opel AG, claiming that, after having failed to sign him to sing in their Scandinavian commercials, they had hired a sound-alike singer. In 2007, the suit was settled, and Waits gave his proceeds to charity.
Bad as Me and later work: 2011–present In 2010, Waits was reported to be working on a new stage musical with director and long-time collaborator
Robert Wilson and playwright
Martin McDonagh. In early 2011, Waits completed a set of 23 poems,
Seeds on Hard Ground, which were inspired by Michael O'Brien's portraits of the homeless in his book,
Hard Ground. O'Brien's book included the poems alongside the portraits. In anticipation of the book release, Waits and
ANTI- printed limited edition chapbooks of the poems to raise money for Redwood Empire Food Bank, a homeless referral and family support service in
Sonoma County, California. As of January 26, 2011, four editions, each limited to 1,000 copies, sold out, raising $90,000 for the food bank. On February 24, 2011, it was announced via Waits's official website that he had begun work on his next studio album. Waits said through his website that on August 23 he would "set the record straight" in regards to rumors of a new release. On August 23, the title of the new album was revealed to be
Bad as Me, and the lead single and title track started being offered via
Amazon.com and other sites. In March 2011, Waits was inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by
Neil Young. In 2013, he lent his voice to
The Simpsons episode "
Homer Goes to Prep School" as a survivalist. On May 5, 2013, he joined
the Rolling Stones on stage at the Oracle Arena in Oakland, California, to duet with
Mick Jagger on
Willie Dixon's "
Little Red Rooster". On October 27, 2013, Waits performed at the 27th annual
Bridge School Benefit concert in Mountain View California;
Rolling Stone called his performance a "triumph". Over the years, Waits made six appearances on the
Late Show with David Letterman, and on May 14, 2015, sang "Take One Last Look" on the show's fifth to last broadcast. He was accompanied by
Larry Taylor on upright bass and Gabriel Donohue on piano accordion, with the horn section of the
CBS Orchestra. In 2016, Waits pursued litigation against French artist Bartabas, who had used several of his songs as a backdrop to a theatrical performance. Claims and counterclaims were made, with Bartabas claiming to have sought and been granted permission to use the material (and to have paid $400,000 for the privilege) but with Waits claiming that his identity had been stolen. The court ruled in Bartabas's favor, and the circus performance was allowed to continue, although the threat of further litigation meant that it was not performed outside France and the resulting DVD release does not contain Waits's material. In 2018, Waits had a feature role in
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a
Western anthology film by the
Coen brothers, as the Prospector. Also in 2018, Waits provided the recorded narration for performances of McDonagh's play
A Very Very Very Dark Matter, which was performed at the
Bridge Theatre, London. In 2021, Waits had a supporting role in
Paul Thomas Anderson's coming-of-age film
Licorice Pizza. In 2023, he joined
Iggy Pop on the
Confidential Show, where they swapped stories and songs. In 2025, he appeared as part of Italian public television channel RAI3’s
The Human Factor series in the last episode, “The Last Ride”, where he read from his poetry book “Seeds On Hard Ground”, and performed a few of his songs. On 12 March 2026, it was revealed that Waits would appear on an upcoming tribute album to
Shane MacGowan and
The Pogues entitled
20th Century Paddy – The Songs of Shane MacGowan, marking his first new studio recording since 2018. In April 2026, Waits and British
trip hop act
Massive Attack released a new single "
Boots on the Ground", a
protest song and Waits' first original music since 2011. The song had been recorded some years prior. ==Musical style==