The one “magic” musician Thom Yorke could never understand and the album that left him in awe
The mix of styles that eventually found their way into the music of Radiohead is incredibly diverse.
At different points, it was possible to hear everyone from the Pixies to Can to Karlheinz Stockhausen to Moby in their work. Thom Yorke was an especially adaptable writer, with folk, punk, jazz, and electronica elements filling in the gaps in his songwriting. In many ways, an artist like Tom Waits was an important precedent for Yorke’s own tendency to blend genres and styles.
“I think I was 17 when Rain Dogs came out,” Yorke told The Guardian about the influence Waits had on him. “I bought the cassette and gazed at the weird guy held by his mother [on the cover] wondering what the fuck that was about. That cassette had a magic I couldn’t figure out… and I got more and more sucked in; it crept deep into my subconscious.”
With its classic mix of New Orleans jazz, Chicago blues, and singularly Tom Waits subject matter, Rain Dogs is still perhaps the musician’s definitive musical statement. With a cinematic scope and a down-and-out nature to the music, Waits welcomed outsiders and burnouts with open arms, something that remained enormously appealing to Yorke in his formative years.
As an individual and dignified artist, no Tom Waits releases could be labelled pop music, but as most fans’ gateway LP, Rain Dogs is the most radio-friendly. Widely recognised as the artist’s consummate product, Rain Dogs continues to stress the pre-conceived bounds of musical convention while remaining decidedly accessible with enduring hits like ‘Downtown Train’, ‘Hang Down Your Head’ and ‘Clap Hands’.
Rain Dogs benefits from colourful instrumentation and discerning production finesse from Mr Waits. With 19 tracks over just 53 minutes, each snappy chapter propels a loose concept of the “urban dispossessed,” inspired by a period of reclusion in a Manhattan basement where Waits wrote most of the album.
“I remember falling asleep listening to it on my Walkman, only to wake up in the morning with it still on autorepeat in my head,” Yorke added. “Every track was a short movie set in a mysterious, circus-like down-at-heel America that I had almost no understanding of, with different characters both in the lyrics and the instruments, an entire universe revealed to me for a few minutes only to drop me at the other end of the block – no idea how I’d got there.”
“Every lyric was an effortless rhyme you could only dream of ever writing,” he added. “Falling off the tongue so beautifully, but never giving easily, keeping half the story to itself. Waits was playing a character with a darkness and humour that felt far more genuine than anything trying to be, I dunno, genuine in 1985.”
“But what really got to me more than anything was the feeling, when you listened to each song, that you were literally standing next to Tom Waits as he sang,” Yorke claimed. “Something about the way they placed the microphones in the room. You could feel the musicians scratching, blowing and beating this world into existence right next to you (and oh my god those weird guitar lines!) with an energy and spontaneity as if they had only just figured it out.”
“This record has never got tired for me, though I have played it over and over throughout my life, as did my kids growing up,” Yorke concluded. “This new mastering has brought all those feelings back to me, back to now, as if it had just been released.”
Check out ‘Anywhere I Lay My Head’ down below.
