Tom Waits’ three favourite folk albums
While Tom Waits’ debut album, Closing Time, might be one of the finest folk records in history, it would’ve been much more of a jazzy affair if the man himself had it his own way. You see, although folk has typically held the tenet of four chords and the truth, Waits prefers to subvert the dogeared genre with a wealth of quirky individualism.
Nevertheless, his debut revealed that beneath all the avant-garde flourishes and meddling that followed, beneath everything in Waits’ florid back catalogue is the backbone of good old folk—it is the foundation from which he experiments. Typically, his own brand stays true to the timeless traditions at the genre’s heart, but rather than age-old tales from his nation’s history, he focuses on weird old America, the circus tents and vaudeville bars.
The folk that he loves in others follows suit, as he says of his favourite Bob Dylan record, the bootleg of his prolific homebound experiments with The Band, The Basement Tapes: “For a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and a saw are to a carpenter. I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in – so the bootlegs I obtained in the sixties and seventies, where the noise and grit of the tapes became inseparable from the music, are essential to me.”
Another essential songwriter in the world of Waits is the precise poetry of Leonard Cohen. Drawing influences from the sphere around them in every sense is a central asset to the grand mausoleum of song that both artists gifted the world and continue to do so in Waits’ case, hopefully with new music very soon. They are timeless artists in this sense.
Timelessness, however, was not a word that rested easily amid the gaudy synth-sedation of the 1980s. In the opulence of the era, if it didn’t have a flashing light, then it was considered old hat. Despite this, the mastery of Waits and Cohen not only survived but thrived. And in Cohen’s case, one of his finest works pitted his scything lyrics with the overture of synths, factory-formed basslines and a studio wattage a million miles away from his former Amish-adjacent standards.
I’m Your Man is a towering album. In 1988, it squeezed a twist of lemon into the sacred recipe of Cohen’s back catalogue without ever ruining the stew. As Waits put it in his unique fashion while championing it as his favourite Cohen record in a Guardian interview: “Euro, klezmer, chansons, apocalyptic, revelations, with that mellifluous voice. A shipwrecked Aznovar, washed up on shore. Important songs, meditative, authoritative, and Leonard is a poet, an Extra Large one.”
As is the late Shane MacGowan, which ties up the trio of Waits’ favourite folk albums as he also championed Rum Sodomy and the Lash by The Pogues. Waits offered up the following appraisal: “Sometimes when things are real flat, you want to hear something flat, other times you just want to project onto it, something more like… you might want to hear the Pogues. Because they love the West. They love all those old movies.” They don’t just love old weird America, like Waits, they love old weird everywhere, exhibiting the stern understanding that the human comedy is inherently a strange one, lubricated by booze that lifts off this album in a vapour of exultation—like all folk at its best.
NB, we’ve wrapped these amazing records up in a little playlist treat at the bottom of the piece.
Tom Waits’ favourite folk albums:
- The Basement Tapes – Bob Dylan & The Band
- Rum Sodomy and the Lash – The Pogues
- I’m Your Man – Leonard Cohen
