Tom Waits

• 1. Introduction

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  Tom Waits accepted his place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011 with a joke at his own expense. “They say that I have no hits and I'm difficult to work with. And they say that like it's a bad thing!” The man who inducted him, Neil Young, had opened by admitting the job was hard. “This next man is indescribable, and I'm here to describe him,” Young said. He then reached for a list that included “sort of a performer, singer, actor, magician, spirit guide, changeling...” Waits writes about drifters, drunks and dreamers, and he sings about them in a deep, gravelly voice. Critics have long argued over what to call him. How did a middle-class boy from Southern California become the bard of society's underbelly? Why did he tear up his own sound just as success arrived? And what explains a career that now moves in rare, widely spaced bursts?

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• 2. Chula Vista Boy

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  Thomas Alan Waits was born on the 7th of December 1949 in Pomona, California, with one older sister and one younger. His father, Jesse Frank Waits, was a Texan of Scots-Irish descent who taught Spanish at a local school. Jesse was also an alcoholic, and his son later called him “a tough one, always an outsider.” His mother, Alma Fern, came from Oregon, had Norwegian ancestry, and ran the household while attending church regularly. The family lived at 318 North Pickering Avenue in Whittier. Waits remembered a “very middle-class” upbringing and “a pretty normal childhood.”

  At Jordan Elementary School he was bullied, but he also learned the bugle and the guitar there. His father showed him the ukulele. Summers took him to maternal relatives in Gridley and Marysville. He later said an uncle's raspy, gravelly voice inspired his own way of singing.

  In 1959, when Waits was ten, his parents separated and his father moved out. He found it traumatic. Alma took the children to Chula Vista, a middle-class suburb of San Diego, and Jesse visited, sometimes taking them on trips to Tijuana.

  At O'Farrell Community School in Southeast San Diego, Waits fronted a band called the Systems. He described it as “white kids trying to get that Motown sound.” He loved R&B and soul singers such as Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett, along with country music and Roy Orbison. Later, Bob Dylan became a hero, and Waits put transcriptions of Dylan's lyrics on his bedroom walls.

  Live shows left deeper marks. In 1962 he saw James Brown at an outdoor theatre in San Diego and said it was “like putting a finger in a light socket.” At fifteen he snuck in to see Lightnin' Hopkins. Waits remembered a door marked “KEEP OUT. This room is for entertainers ONLY,” and he decided he had to get into show business as soon as possible.

  At Hilltop High School in Chula Vista, he called himself “kind of an amateur juvenile delinquent.” He also saw himself as a “rebel against the rebels.” Instead of the growing hippie scene, he chose the Beat generation of the 1950s, especially Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. In 1968, at eighteen, he dropped out of school. He watched Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone avidly, and the comedian Lenny Bruce left a mark too.

  Work supplied raw material. At Napoleone's pizza restaurant in National City, and at a local diner, he grew fascinated by the customers. He wrote down phrases and snippets of dialogue he overheard. He also spent three years as a fireman in the forestry service, served with the U.S. Coast Guard, and enrolled at Southwestern Community College to study photography. Then came piano lessons, and the folk venues of San Diego began to pull him in.

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• 3. Troubadour To Tropicana

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  In 1969 the Heritage coffeehouse hired Waits as an occasional doorman, and before long he was singing there. His early set leaned on Dylan covers and Red Sovine's “Phantom 309.” Gradually he added originals, often country parodies or bittersweet ballads drawn from his love life, such as “Ol' 55” and “I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love With You.” He supported Tim Buckley, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and his friend Jack Tempchin at other San Diego venues.

  San Diego offered little room to climb, so Waits began traveling to Los Angeles to play the Troubadour in West Hollywood. There, in the autumn of 1971, Herb Cohen signed him to publishing and recording contracts. Those recordings sat unreleased until the early 1990s, when they appeared as The Early Years and The Early Years, Volume Two. Waits was angry about that, calling many of the demos “baby pictures.” In early 1972 he quit Napoleone's and moved to an apartment in Silver Lake, a poor neighborhood known for its Hispanic and bohemian communities.

  At the Troubadour he also met David Geffen, whose Asylum Records gave him a contract. Jerry Yester produced the debut, Closing Time, at Sunset Sound in Hollywood. It came out in March 1973 and attracted little attention. Waits had wanted a piano-led jazz album, but Yester steered it toward folk. Buckley covered “Martha” on his album Sefronia that year, and the Eagles recorded “Ol' 55.” Waits found their version “a little antiseptic,” although it brought him money and recognition.

  To promote the album, Waits toured the United States as a supporting act, opening for Tom Rush, Charlie Rich and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, among others. He returned to Los Angeles in June feeling demoralized. Cohen then persuaded him to join Frank Zappa's tour after the previous support act, Kathy Dalton, quit over hostile fans. Waits found the same hostility. Audiences jeered him and pelted him with fruit, and he felt intimidated by Zappa himself.

  For his second album, Geffen chose the jazz-minded producer Bones Howe. Howe recalled telling Waits that his words had a Kerouac quality, and that he played jazz drums himself. He also promised a copy of rare tapes of Kerouac reading his poetry. “That sealed it,” Howe said. The Heart of Saturday Night was recorded in April and May at Wally Heider's Studio 3 on Cahuenga Boulevard. Waits conceived it as a sequence of songs about U.S. nightlife. It drew far more reviews than Closing Time, though he later dismissed it as “very ill-formed, but I was trying.” A second Zappa tour met the same hostility, yet having survived it lifted his standing in the industry.

  In October 1974 he headlined for the first time. In New York City he met Bette Midler, and the two began a sporadic affair. Cohen then suggested a live album, so Waits played two shows at the Record Plant Studio for a small invited audience, staged to recall a jazz club. Nighthawks at the Diner came out in October 1975, with a title and cover inspired by Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks of 1942. Howe produced it, and every later Asylum release as well.

  A grueling spring tour of the United States left Waits telling interviewers he was drinking too much. In May 1976 he made his first European tour, playing London, Amsterdam, Brussels and Copenhagen. Back in Los Angeles, he joined his friend Chuck E. Weiss at the Tropicana Motel in West Hollywood, a place with a reputation in rock circles. Visitors noted that his two-room apartment was heavily cluttered. He told the Los Angeles Times, “You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty.”

  In July 1976 he recorded Small Change, again with Howe. Waits remembered it as the moment he became “completely confident in the craft.” It was his first release to enter the Billboard Top 100 album list, peaking at 89. Per Bowman wrote that it showed Waits had become a master storyteller, shaped by crime writers such as Dashiell Hammett and John D. MacDonald. Songs included “Tom Traubert's Blues,” “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)” and “Step Right Up.” Newsweek, Time, Vogue and The New Yorker all profiled him, and a cult following took shape. On tour he was backed by the Nocturnal Emissions: Frank Vicari, Chip White and Fitz Jenkins. During “Pasties and a G-String,” a stripper joined him onstage.

  Trouble followed. He toured Japan for the first time at the start of 1977, and back in Los Angeles a fan who had escaped a mental health institution in Illinois began stalking him outside the Tropicana. In May 1977, Waits and Weiss were arrested for fighting with police officers in a coffee shop. They faced two counts of disturbing the peace but were acquitted after the defense produced eight witnesses who contradicted the officers. Waits sued the Los Angeles Police Department and, five years later, was awarded $7,500 in damages.

  In July and August 1977 he recorded Foreign Affairs, with Bob Alcivar as arranger. It included “I Never Talk to Strangers,” a duet with Midler, who joined him at the Troubadour to sing it. Critics liked it less than Small Change, and it missed the Billboard Top 100. That year Waits also began a relationship with the singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones, and the two influenced each other's work. On the October tour he first used a prop onstage, a street lamp. He also reached beyond music. Through his friendship with Sylvester Stallone, he made his film debut as a drunken piano player in Stallone's Paradise Alley in 1978.

  Blue Valentine began recording in July 1978. Midway through, Waits replaced his musicians to get a less jazz-oriented sound, and he switched from piano to electric guitar as his main instrument. Bowman observed that his characters shifted from skid-row drunks to junkies and prostitutes, in songs such as “Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis” and “Red Shoes by the Drugstore.” The first single, a cover of “Somewhere” from West Side Story, failed to chart. For the tour, he had a gas station built as a stage set, with Leon Redbone as the opening act. The critic Jim Fusilli later praised Waits for creating characters who, even in despair, are capable of startling insight. He called him “A keen, sensitive and sympathetic chronicler of the adrift and downtrodden.”

  Waits grew dissatisfied with Elektra-Asylum, which he felt had lost interest in him in favor of the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon and Queen. A phone call with Weiss led him to tell Jones, “Chuck E.'s in love,” and she turned the line into her song “Chuck E.'s in Love.” After an appearance on Saturday Night Live, it climbed to number 4. Her success strained their relationship, and so did her heroin addiction. Waits joined the first leg of her European tour, then ended things. He moved briefly to Crenshaw Boulevard to be near his father, then to New York City, first at the Chelsea Hotel and then on West 26th Street. He said he “just needed a new urban landscape.” In 1979 a rotoscoped Waits even starred in a music video titled Tom Waits For No One.

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• 4. Brennan And Reinvention

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  Francis Ford Coppola summoned Waits back to Los Angeles to write the soundtrack for One from the Heart. Waits felt torn. Coppola wanted music like his early work, a style he was trying to leave behind, so he called the job an artistic “step backwards.” He went anyway, working in a room set aside in Coppola's Hollywood studios. The method was new to him, and he later admitted, “I was sweating buckets.”

  On that set he ran into Kathleen Brennan, a young Irish-American assistant story editor he had first met while filming Paradise Alley. He later called it “love at first sight,” and they were engaged within a week. In August 1980 they married at a 24-hour wedding chapel on Manchester Boulevard in Watts, then honeymooned in Tralee, in County Kerry, where her family lived. Biographer Barney Hoskyns wrote that she gave him “a sense of emotional security he had never known.” Some old friends felt shut out by the marriage. Waits said, “She rescued me,” and he credited her as the one steering the ship.

  He still owed Elektra-Asylum one album, so he paused the Coppola work to write one he first called White Spades. He recorded it in June, and it appeared in September as Heartattack and Vine. It had a harder R&B edge, reached number 96 on the Billboard Top 100 album chart, and earned generally good reviews. Hoskyns called it one of Waits's pinnacle achievements. Its song “Jersey Girl” was later recorded by Bruce Springsteen, and Waits was grateful for both the money and the respect of a songwriter he admired.

  The soundtrack sessions ran from October 1980 until September 1981. Several tracks were duets with Crystal Gayle, because Midler, Waits's first choice, was unavailable. The film reached theaters in 1982 to largely poor reviews. Waits appeared briefly as a trumpet player in a crowd scene, and he felt his album was over-produced. Still, it earned him an Academy Award nomination for Original Music Score. The critic Humphries judged the job a key step in carrying him from cult figure to center stage.

  With his Elektra-Asylum contract complete and a new marriage, Waits decided to reinvent himself. He parted on good terms from the producer Howe. With Brennan's help, he began firing Cohen, and the couple took over management. Waits had come to believe Cohen had swindled him, saying, “I thought I was a millionaire and it turned out I had, like, twenty bucks.”

  Brennan also reshaped his ears. She introduced him to Captain Beefheart, of whom Waits said, “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 built his own instruments from everyday materials. Waits began basing songs on images rather than moods or characters. He credited his wife with helping him “find the place where Lead Belly and Schoenberg overlap.”

  He wrote Swordfishtrombones during a two-week trip to Ireland. He recorded it at Sunset Sound and produced it himself, with Brennan often attending the sessions to offer advice. It was his first album without a saxophone and his first with a marimba. Asylum declined to release it. Chris Blackwell of Island Records stepped in, since Island had a reputation for signing experimental acts such as King Crimson, Roxy Music and Sparks. Waits did not tour for it, partly because Brennan was pregnant. He did appear in a video for “In the Neighborhood,” co-directed by Haskell Wexler and Michael A. Russ. Russ also designed the cover, which showed Waits beside Lee Kolima, a circus strongman, and Angelo Rossitto.

  Jon Pareles wrote that Waits's grumble now bounced off an odd assortment of horns, percussion, organ and keyboards, as if he had led “a Salvation Army band into a broken-down Hong Kong disco.” NME ranked the album second best of its year. In 1989, Spin magazine named it the second greatest album of all time.

  The family then moved to New York City, to be near Brennan's parents and Island's U.S. office, settling in a loft apartment near Union Square. Waits found city life frustrating, but it introduced him to many musicians and artists. He befriended John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards, and the two shared a studio in the Westbeth artist-community building in Greenwich Village.

  From the mid-1980s, the cabaret-flavored musical theater of Kurt Weill became a major influence on Waits's work. Another spark was his soundtrack for Streetwise, a documentary about homeless youth in Seattle. Rain Dogs was recorded at RCA Studios in mid 1985, and Waits called it “kind of an interaction between Appalachia and Nigeria.” Keith Richards played on several tracks, and he later said Waits had encouraged his debut solo album, Talk is Cheap. The record also marked the debut of Marc Ribot as a session guitarist, and Ribot went on to play on many later Waits albums. Jean-Baptiste Mondino directed the video for “Downtown Train,” featuring the boxer Jake LaMotta. Patty Smyth covered the song in 1987, and Rod Stewart took it into the top five in 1990. Rolling Stone named Waits its Songwriter of the Year in 1985, and NME crowned Rain Dogs the best album of the year.

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• 5. Stage, Screen And Studio

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  Jim Jarmusch met Waits at a party Jean-Michel Basquiat held for John Lurie, and he later wrote the film Down by Law with Waits and Lurie in mind. Shot in New Orleans, it opened and closed with songs from Rain Dogs. Jarmusch said, “Tom and I have a kindred aesthetic. An interest in unambitious people, marginal people.” Waits called him “Dr. Sullen,” and Jarmusch called Waits “The Prince of Melancholy.” Waits later voiced a part in Jarmusch's Mystery Train, scored his Night on Earth, and in 2003 appeared in Coffee and Cigarettes, chatting with Iggy Pop.

  In 1983, Waits had played three roles for Coppola. He was Benny, a philosopher running a billboard store, in Rumble Fish. He was Buck Merrill in The Outsiders, and the maître'd in The Cotton Club. He said Coppola was “the only film director in Hollywood that has a conscience.” Hoskyns argued that Hector Babenco's Ironweed, where Waits played Rudy the Kraut, put him on the mainstream map as a character actor.

  Over four years in the early 1990s he made seven film appearances. Among them were a plainclothes cop in The Two Jakes, a disabled war veteran in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King, and Renfield in Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. In Robert Altman's Short Cuts he played Earl Piggot, an alcoholic limousine driver, which Hoskyns thought might be his best acting. Waits kept telling the press he was not an actor, only someone who did some acting.

  The stage had pulled at him even earlier. In late 1985, Waits agreed that the Steppenwolf Theatre Company would perform Franks Wild Years at Chicago's Briar Street Theatre, with Waits starring as Frank. He described Frank as “A legend in Rainville since he burned his house down and took off for the Big Time.” The songs became his 1987 album, which NME ranked fifth among that year's albums. It was his first collaboration with David Hidalgo, who played accordion on “Cold, Cold Ground” and “Train Song.” Waits then toured North America and Europe, his last full tour for two decades. Two shows became the concert film Big Time, directed by Chris Blum and released in 1988.

  In 1989 he began planning a project with the theater director Robert Wilson, whom he had known throughout the 1980s. It was The Black Rider, a “cowboy opera” based on the German folk tale of the Freischütz, which had also inspired Carl Maria von Weber's opera of 1821. At Allen Ginsberg's suggestion, Waits and Wilson approached William S. Burroughs to write the lyrics. They flew to Kansas to meet him, and Burroughs agreed. Waits went to Hamburg in May 1989, and Burroughs joined him there. The show opened at Hamburg's Thalia Theater in March 1990 and later toured internationally. Waits said in 2004, “Wilson is my teacher.” The songs reached record shops in the fall of 1993.

  In between came Bone Machine, his tenth studio album, in August 1992. Waits wanted “more machinery sounds,” reflecting his interest in industrial music. He recorded it in an old storage room at Prairie Sun, a space with a cement floor and a hot water heater. “It's got some good echo,” he said. Eight tracks were co-written with Brennan, and “That Feel” was co-written with Richards. Steve Huey called it a morbid, sinister nightmare and perhaps Waits's most cohesive album. It won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album, and Waits asked Jarmusch, “alternative to what?!”

  Waits and Wilson next turned to Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland. They began work in Hamburg in early 1992, and Alice premiered at the Thalia in December 1992. Waits called the songs “adult songs for children, or children's songs for adults.” He drew on a growing interest in freak shows, and he thought the play was about “repression, mental illness and obsessive, compulsive disorders.” In 2000 he wrote songs for Wilson's version of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, staged at the Betty Nansen Theater in Copenhagen. He liked it as “a proletariat story,” about a poor soldier manipulated by the government.

  Waits recorded the songs from both plays with jazz and avant-garde musicians from San Francisco. Alice and Blood Money were released together in May 2002 and entered the U.S. chart at numbers 32 and 33. He called Alice “more metaphysical,” and Blood Money “more earthbound, more carnival.”

  The instruments tell the story of his tastes. Swordfishtrombones used talking drums, bagpipes, banjo, bass marimba and glass harmonica. Rain Dogs added accordion and harmonium, and Franks Wild Years brought glockenspiel, Mellotron, Farfisa and Optigan. Bone Machine and Mule Variations featured the Chamberlin, The Black Rider the singing saw, and Alice the Stroh violin. Blood Money used a 57-whistle pneumatic calliope and an Indonesian seedpod. Waits described his own voice as “Louis Armstrong and Ethel Merman meeting in Hell.” Daniel Durchholz said it sounded like it was soaked in bourbon, smoked for months, then run over with a car. When the video for “God's Away On Business” was planned, the emus meant to star in it were eaten by coyotes, and shooting waited for replacements.

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• 6. Rights And Wrongs

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  In 1981, Waits recorded a voice-over for a television advert for Butcher's Blend dog food, but he soon objected to musicians letting companies use their songs for advertising. “Artists who take money for ads poison and pervert their songs,” he said. In November 1988 he sued Frito-Lay over a Doritos advert that used an impersonator performing “Step Right Up.” The case reached court in April 1990, and Waits won in 1992. The $2.6 million settlement was larger than his earnings from all his previous albums combined. It also gave him and Brennan a reputation as tireless adversaries.

  In May 2001, Waits joined Nancy and Ann Wilson of Heart, and Randy Newman, in a $40 million lawsuit against mp3.com for copyright infringement. A later case came from Spain, where Audi asked to use “Innocent When You Dream” in a commercial. Waits declined, but the advert ran with music very close to the song. A Spanish court found a violation of his moral rights as well as copyright infringement. The production company, Tandem Campmany Guasch, was ordered to pay compensation through his Spanish publisher. Waits joked that they had the song's name wrong and thought it was called “Innocent When You Scheme.”

  In 2005 he sued Adam Opel AG. He said that after failing to sign him for Scandinavian commercials, the company hired a sound-alike singer. The suit settled in 2007, and Waits gave his proceeds to charity.

  His last big fight, in 2016, went the other way. The French artist Bartabas had used several Waits songs as a backdrop to a theatrical performance. Bartabas said he had asked permission and paid $400,000 for it. Waits said his identity had been stolen. The court ruled for Bartabas, and the circus performance could continue. But the threat of further litigation kept it from playing outside France, and the DVD release leaves Waits's material out.

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• 7. Persona And Privacy

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  Barney Hoskyns once wrote that Tom Waits “is as much of a character created for his fans as it is a real man.” In Hoskyns's view, the skid-row hobo persona was an “ongoing experiment in performance art” and a screen to deflect attention. Mick Brown, a journalist from Sounds who interviewed Waits in the mid-1970s, said he had immersed himself in the role until it became an identity. The friend Louie Lista summed up the attitude as, “I'm an outsider, but I'll revel in being an outsider.”

  Robert Marchese, who managed the Troubadour, was blunter. He said Waits cultivated “the whole mystique of this really funky dude and all that Charles Bukowski crap,” while in reality he was “basically a middle-class, San Diego mom-and-pop-schoolteacher kid.” Humphries saw something similar, writing that Waits has always been more of a white-picket-fence kind of guy than you might imagine. Jarmusch called him “a very contradictory character,” potentially violent if he feels crossed but also gentle and kind. Herbert Hardesty, who worked with him on Blue Valentine, thought him “a very pleasant human being.” Humphries called him reticent, reflective and surprisingly shy.

  Onstage, Waits tended to dress in black. He said a performance should be “a spectacle and entertaining.” One recurring prop was a megaphone he shouted through at the audience. In interviews he deflected questions about his private life, drifted into tangents and tossed in trivia. Humphries called his quick one-liners “Waitsisms,” and he is also known for getting irate with journalists. He dislikes touring, though Hoskyns noted he has a strong work ethic.

  Alcohol was part of the image. “I discovered alcohol at an early age, and that guided me a lot,” he told one interviewer. In the 1970s he was a heavy drinker and smoker who avoided any drug harder than cocaine. In 1992, he quit drinking and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. He took part in charitable causes in those years, contributing a song to the HIV/AIDS benefit album Red Hot + Blue in 1990 and appearing at a fundraiser for victims of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

  Before his marriage, Waits had a brief relationship with the comedian Elayne Boosler, alongside his involvements with Midler and Jones. After marrying Brennan in 1980, he became increasingly reclusive. The couple have three children: Kellesimone Wylder Waits, born in 1983, Casey Waits, born in 1985, and Sullivan Blake Waits, born in 1993. In 1991 the family moved to the outskirts of Sonoma. Later they moved to a secluded house near Valley Ford after a bypass road was built near the first one. They live in Sonoma County, California.

  When Brennan was pregnant with Sullivan in early 1993, Waits cut back his workload. For three years he turned down all offers to perform or act, which fed rumors that he was seriously ill or separated from his wife. He still made cameo and guest appearances on albums by musicians he admired. In February 1996 he held a benefit to raise money 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 Dead Man Walking soundtrack. In 1998 Island released Beautiful Maladies, a compilation of 23 tracks that Waits himself chose.

  Waits has refused to sanction any biography. When Hoskyns researched his unauthorized 2009 book, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, Waits and his wife asked people not to speak to him. Hoskyns believed Brennan was responsible for the “wall of inaccessibility” around her husband. Asked about religion, Waits said only, “With the God stuff I don't know. I don't know what's out there any more than anyone else.”

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• 8. Late Albums And Silence

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  Waits and the label Anti- sealed their deal “over a coffee in a truck stop.” His contract with Island had expired, Blackwell had resigned, and Waits chose not to renew. Anti- was a newly launched offshoot of the punk label Epitaph Records. Its president, Andy Kaulkin, said the label was “blown away that Tom would even consider us.” Waits called Epitaph a label run by and for artists, “a partnership” instead of “a plantation.”

  He had been recording at Prairie Sun since June 1998, and Anti- released Mule Variations in March 1999. Its songs often touched on rural American life and drew on early blues recordings made by Alan Lomax. Waits coined the word “surrural” for it, blending “surreal” and “rural.” It reached number 30 on the Billboard 200, his highest showing. Mojo named it Album of the Year, and it won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Of that label, Waits said, “That's not a bad thing to be called if you've got to be in some kind of category.”

  That March he played his first live show in three years, at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas, as part of South by Southwest. In October he performed at Neil Young's Bridge School benefit. In September 2002, he appeared at a California hearing on music industry accounting. He praised Anti- but told the panel, “the record companies are like cartels. It's a nightmare to be trapped in one.”

  Real Gone arrived in 2004, his fifteenth studio album, recorded in an abandoned schoolhouse in Locke. Hoskyns called it Waits's “roughest, most unkempt music to date.” Waits built beats by beatboxing, a technique from his interest in hip hop, and Bowman noted that he made many of those home recordings in his bathroom. Three songs expressed his anger at the presidency of George W. Bush and the Iraq War. “At a certain point, saying absolutely nothing is a political statement of its own,” he said. The album earned him a nomination at the 2005 Brit Awards. When he toured Europe, his only London show drew 78,000 applications for around 3,700 tickets.

  In 2006 he issued Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, a 54-song, three-disc set he described as “songs that fell behind the stove while making dinner.” Brawlers held raucous rock and blues, Bawlers held melancholic ballads, and Bastards held stories and spoken word. His son Casey played in his touring band. In 2008 he began the Glitter and Doom Tour, with both his sons in the band. In June, at a concert in El Paso, Texas, he was handed the key to the city. Glitter and Doom Live followed in 2009.

  Early in 2011, Waits completed Seeds on Hard Ground, a set of 23 poems inspired by Michael O'Brien's portraits of the homeless in his book Hard Ground. He and Anti- printed four limited chapbook editions of 1,000 copies each, which sold out and raised $90,000 for the Redwood Empire Food Bank in Sonoma County. On the 23rd of August 2011 he revealed Bad as Me as the title of his next album, and Richards played on it again.

  Waits has not toured or played a full-length concert since 2008, and has issued no new album since 2011. Since 2012 he has focused more on poetry and acting, appearing as a retired serial killer in Seven Psychopaths and as the Prospector in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. He voiced a survivalist in a 2013 episode of The Simpsons. He still turns up now and then, usually for one to three songs. On the 5th of May 2013 he sang “Little Red Rooster” with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones in Oakland, California. After six appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman, he sang “Take One Last Look” on the 14th of May 2015, the show's fifth-to-last broadcast. In 2023 he joined Iggy Pop on the Confidential Show, trading stories and songs.

  The quiet may be thinning. On the 12th of March 2026 it emerged that Waits would appear on 20th Century Paddy, a tribute album to Shane MacGowan and The Pogues, his first new studio recording since 2018. A month later, in April 2026, he and the British trip hop act Massive Attack released “Boots on the Ground,” a protest song and his first original music since 2011. The track had been recorded some years earlier.

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