Tom Waits Underground Analysis

Eight albums in and we’ve gone from a quiet little bar in anytown USA, steeped in nostalgia and sweetness to something else entirely. It was building from the start and although that only comes through in hindsight and by looking at the trajectory of his career, it doesn’t seem completely shocking that Tom Waits would end up making an album like Swordfishtrombones when he did, in 1983. Rising out of the jazz, blues and pop standard traditions he explored in previous albums, this is a theatrical reconstruction of those genres by way of a junkyard.

The album kicks off with the stop motion percussion of “Underground,” setting the stage for this collection of songs made of things that the mainstream has discarded or buried. There’s an immediate …show more content…
There’s a feeling here that this music, these feelings, cannot be contained and the characters we encounter are expressing themselves by any means they can find. It’s similar to the feeling I got when I saw Stomp many years ago. Music exists everywhere if you want it …show more content…
In this neighborhood, the kids can’t get ice cream because the market burned down and there's always construction going on, but it’s still home. If I had to pick one thing Waits does absolutely better than anybody, it’s understanding humans. Whether it’s this neighborhood or the regulars of the skid rows he sings about, he’s never looking from the outside in. He’s in there and not judging anything and as a result, he reveals the truths that are covered in mud, even if he doesn’t explicitly name them. The quick, witty poem “Frank’s Wild Years” features the best line I’ve ever heard in “Frank settled down in the Valley and he hung his wild years on a nail that he drove through his wife’s forehead.” This is the sort of sentence we would have talked about for hours back in my literature courses in college. It’s all there, the whole story, without