“Certainly a craftsman”: Tom Waits on his underrated hero
When writing about Tom Waits’ sound and style, people often make connections to other avant-garde experimenters like Captain Beefheart, Lord Buckley, or Nick Cave. However, when he first hit the scene in the early 1970s, he had a lot more in common with softly sung singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne or John Prine.
He also drew on a wide range of influences, from Bob Dylan to James Brown, Ray Charles, and the Howlin’ Wolf. Waits was a jazzman at heart, though, and his early albums reflected that. While he could never sing like Sinatra, the crooner cast a spell over the young Waits in the same way that luminaries like Thelonious Monk or Louis Armstrong and Mose Allison did.
He combined the beatnik urgency and poetry of Jack Kerouac with the subtle sensibility of songwriters Hoagy Carmichael or Cole Porter, the gritty honesty and honestly gritty vocals of Muddy Waters with the warmth and experimentation of jazz from masters like Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker.
When Eagles scored a hit with a cover of Waits’ debut single ‘Ol 55’, he was briefly cast into the limelight and pigeonholed as just another singer-songwriter working on the West Coast scene. Waits himself never liked their version and was probably fonder of any references to his work alongside that of Bruce Springsteen, Nina Simone or Warren Zevon than with Eagles. More than any of those, though, he probably has the most in common with another West Coast songwriter who himself has a strong southern influence and roots in the blues and jazz: Randy Newman.
During a 1979 interview in Australia, Don Lane asked Tom Waits about his singing style “How does a guy with a voice like that decide to be a singer and succeed?” The same question could be asked of Randy Newman, and he has himself quipped that the generation who grew up listening to the Toy Story soundtrack might be the first generation who would grow up to like his singing voice.
But it’s not just in their unconventional singing styles that the pair share terrain. They both have a wicked way of writing songs that can wrong-foot you, throw you off balance and catch you unawares. They can both make you roar with laughter and howl with pain, often in the same song, and there really are no two finer writers of emotional or tender ballads anywhere in the American landscape.
They can both inhabit characters in their material and shine a light on the underrepresented, forgotten, downtrodden, and maligned sides of society. They are both incredible melodists as well as lyricists. They both combine low art and high art in their arrangements, combining roots rock with great piano parts and lush orchestration, filling their songs with filmic cinematics, stage-worthy theatricality, and novelistic linguistics.
Throughout his career, Waits has been keen to pay homage to his contemporaries who have inspired him and has publicly praised Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Keith Richards plenty of times, but from very early on, he has been a champion of Randy Newman, as well.
“There are songwriters that I like that aren’t so well liked,” Waits told Howard and Roz Larman during a 1974 interview on the KPFK-FM 90.7 radio station. “It’s all a matter of what your own taste is, but I do think there’s a strong difference between someone like Randy Newman, who is certainly a craftsman when it comes to putting a song together, someone who can evoke such a feeling from his listeners and it comes from him really sweating over a song. I think it’s certainly craft.”
At the time, Newman’s most recent album was the 1972 masterpiece Sail Away, and his next album – and next masterpiece – was only months away. Good Old Boys, one of the finest and most underrated albums of the decade, was released a few months after Waits’ radio remarks.
In the press release for his own next album, The Heart of Saturday Night, Waits again namechecked Newman as an influence, alongside Mose Allison, Thelonious Monk, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Ray Charles, Stephen Foster, Frank Sinatra and more, and repeatedly referred to him in interviews through the rest of the decade.
In 1999, Waits was asked by Barney Hoskyns if Randy Newman had been an influence on him at all. “Yeah,” he said. “Because he was always like a Brill Building guy. He was part of that whole tradition: you go sit down in a room, and you write songs all day. Then you get these runners, and you get the songs out to Ray Charles or Dusty Springfield. I mean, that’s what Joni Mitchell was doing, too, she was sitting in a room writing songs, it was just the perception of yourself as a songwriter was changing. And I caught that wave, the songwriters garnering understanding and sympathy and encouragement.”
