Swordfishtrombones

Rain Dogs is the eighth studio album by American singer-songwriter Tom Waits. A loose concept album about "the urban dispossessed" of New York City, Rain Dogs is generally considered the middle album of a trilogy that includes Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years. The album, which includes appearances by guitarists Keith Richards and Marc Ribot, is noted for its broad spectrum of musical styles and genres, described by Rolling Stone as merging "Kurt Weill, pre-rock integrity from old dirty blues, [and] the elegiac melancholy of New Orleans funeral brass, into a singularly idiosyncratic American style". In 1989, it was ranked number 21 on the Rolling Stone list of the "100 greatest albums of the 1980s". In 2012, the album was ranked number 399 on the magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Rain Dogs is the ninth studio album by American singer-songwriter Tom Waits, released in September 1985 on Island Records. A loose concept album about "the urban dispossessed" of New York City, Rain Dogs is generally considered the middle album of a trilogy that includes Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years. The album, which features guitarists Keith Richards and Marc Ribot, is noted for its broad spectrum of musical styles and genres, described by Arion Berger as merging "outsider influences – socialist decadence by way of Kurt Weill, pre-rock integrity from old dirty blues, the elegiac melancholy of New Orleans funeral brass – into a singularly idiosyncratic American style." The album peaked at number 29 on the UK charts and number 188 on the US Billboard Top 200. Rod Stewart had success with his cover of "Downtown Train", later included on some editions of his 1991 album Vagabond Heart. In 1989, it was ranked number 21 on the Rolling Stone list of the "100 greatest albums of the 1980s." In 2012, the album was ranked number 399 on the magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and at number 357 in 2020.

Thomas Alan "Tom" Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, composer and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car."With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock music styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music, Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona. He has worked as a composer for movies and musical plays and as a supporting actor in films, including Down By Law and Bram Stoker's Dracula. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his soundtrack work on One from the Heart.

Tom Waits pulled off a neat trick with the 1983 release of Swordfishtrombones: he disengaged himself from the present (and his own recent achievements) and allied himself with the past. And yet no one could accuse him of becoming mired in nostalgia. A decade before the phrase lo-fi gained favor, Waits purposely ravaged his songs by stomping them into peculiar shapes and utilizing arcane instruments and recording techniques to further bend them into new kinds of aural sculptures. The result was a genuine musical breakthrough. Beautiful Maladies gathers 23 tracks from Waits's seven post-Swordfishtrombones Island albums. These pretty/ugly tracks provide a riveting view of Tom's wild years. While at least four Waits Island titles qualify as essentials, Beautiful Maladies and the 1988 live set, Big Time, provide compact introductions to a matchless body of work.

Night On Earth is a mostly instrumental recording from Tom Waits, and made for the movie with the same title by Jim Jarmusch. The songs are mostly in the vein of his foregoing four studio albums at that time (Swordfishtrombones through Bone Machine - particularly the latter album and Rain Dogs), in that they feature his typically quirky percussion and wind instrument soundscapes - his "junkyard orchestra."……..

With its jarring rhythms and unusual instrumentation – marimba, accordion, various percussion – as well as its frequently surreal lyrics, Rain Dogs is very much a follow-up to Swordfishtrombones, which is to say that it sounds for the most part like The Threepenny Opera being sung by Howlin' Wolf. The chief musical difference is the introduction of guitarist Marc Ribot, who adds his noisy leads to the general cacophony. But Rain Dogs is sprawling where its predecessor had been focused: Tom Waits' lyrics here sometimes are imaginative to the point of obscurity, seemingly chosen to fit the rhythms rather than for sense.

In the work of American songwriter Tom Waits, swampy blues, Beat poetry, West Coast jazz, Tin Pan Alley, country, 1930s-era cabaret, and post-Civil War parlor songs meet neon-lit carnival music and the wheezing, clattering, experimental rhythms (often played by makeshift musical instruments from car radios to metal pipes and tin cans, hence his love of Edgard Varese and Harry Partch) form a keenly individual musical universe. It has often been imitated but never replicated.