meta-scriptSongbook: How Bruce Springsteen's Portraits Of America Became Sounds Of Hope During Confusing Times | GRAMMY.com
Songbook: How Bruce Springsteen's Portraits Of America Became Sounds Of Hope During Confusing Times

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Songbook: How Bruce Springsteen's Portraits Of America Became Sounds Of Hope During Confusing Times

In this edition of Songbook, GRAMMY.com explores how Bruce Springsteen's empathy for his working-class characters evolved alongside his own commercial success. The Boss is the subject of a new exhibit at the GRAMMY Museum, Bruce Springsteen Live!

GRAMMYs/Oct 14, 2022 - 07:00 pm

If you knew nothing else about him there’s still a good chance you’d recognize Bruce Springsteen by the name "The Boss." The nickname predates his entire career as a recording artist, going back to his days as a teenage bandleader at the Jersey Shore. In a bit of amusing irony, it’s also a name that stands in complete contrast to his 50 year canon of songs from the perspective of working-class folks. "I hate being called the boss," Springsteen admitted in a 1999 biography. "I hate bosses." 

In "The Wish," a 1987 studio outtake eventually released on *Tracks* in 1998, Springsteen’s narrator traces his adult prosperity as The Boss back to a single childhood Christmas when his mother bought him a "brand-new Japanese guitar." The lyrics echo Springsteen’s real-life story of his own first electric guitar — a Japanese-made Kent, that he purchased for $70 in 1964 with the help of a loan his mother had taken out. Fifty-seven Christmases later, in December 2021, Springsteen sold his fifty-year catalog of songs for a record-setting $550 million dollars.

Over the course of those 50 years, Springsteen has won 20 GRAMMY Awards, two Golden Globes, an Academy Award for Best Original Song, and a Tony Award for his one-man show "Springsteen on Broadway." Though still one EMMY Award short of a full EGOT, he’s nonetheless made do with honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded to him in 2016 by President [Barack Obama](https://www.grammy.com/artists/barack-obama/4975) (with whom he would later host a podcast and write a *New York Times* bestselling book) and a planet — 23990 Springsteen — named in his honor. 

From his inauspicious start to his initial commercial peak in the 1980s, and through a career resurgence in the early 2000s, one of the Boss’ most remarkable achievements is that his songs have never seemed to lose their blue-collar everyman perspective. If anything, Springsteen's early climb to success found him advocating more fiercely and empathetically for the American working class. Over the decades and 20 studio albums, he established an unmatched pedigree for literary power and modern everyman myth-making, — powers that would eventually put him back in the spotlight at a time when America desperately needed those types of stories.

In this edition of Songbook — and ahead of the launch of  *[Bruce Springsteen Live!](https://grammymuseum.org/event/brucelive/)* at the GRAMMY Museum — GRAMMY.com explores how The Boss’s empathy for his working-class characters evolved alongside his own commercial success in the 1970s, and how that reputation gave way to his comeback in the 2000s.   

"A town full of losers": 1972 - 1975 

Bruce Springsteen was only 23 years old when he signed to Columbia Records in 1972, but had already been thoroughly fawned over by local live music critics and industry types who were hailing the young songwriter as something like "the next [Bob Dylan](https://www.grammy.com/artists/bob-dylan/3014)." 

Although his 1973 debut *Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ* and its September followup *The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle* both underperformed commercially compared to that effusive praise, the young songwriter was beginning to carve out his thematic niche, expanding granular portraits of Jersey Shore life into ambitious outsized literary dramas. The sophomore record closes on a 10-minute-long rock opera called "New York City Serenade" set in a brutal and desperate vision of the Big City that poses a constant threat to the song’s impoverished fictional protagonists: "It’s midnight in Manhattan, this is no time to get cute," Springsteen whispers. "So walk tall / Or baby, don’t walk at all."

After the commercial disappointment of the first two records, released less than a year apart, Columbia offered a massive hail mary budget to Springsteen and the newly-minted E Street Band for their third record, which they recorded over a grueling and obsessive 14 month period. When it was finally released in 1975, Born To Run became a breakthrough record for the band almost in spite of Columbia’s similarly aggressive marketing campaign. The album, which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, showed  steady growth in its first few weeks on the backs of a successful word-of-mouth radio campaign, itself based on a leaked early mix of the title track.

The real-life underdog story of Born To Run bubbles up under every beat and every word, with an inherent drama that builds gentle tracks into dense and theatrical finales. Overeager characters like the narrator of "Born To Run" talk themselves through feverish and impassioned cases for escaping the "death trap" of small town life and an existence doomed to "sweat[ing] it out on the streets / Of a runaway American dream."

The long-winded narrator of "Thunder Road" puts the stakes more bluntly: "It’s a town full of losers / And I’m pulling out of here to win." The abstraction between those characters and their authors — a young band mounting a last-ditch effort at breaking out of the local bar band circuit into a tangible future in music — allows *Born To Run* to point outwards to a much broader feeling of American restlessness: the particularly youthful and overzealous belief that our potential in life is limited only by our force of will.

"I ain’t nothin’ but tired": 1978-1984

As *Born To Run* lifted the band into steady commercial success, Springsteen's portraits of working class life were growing increasingly disillusioned and fatalistic. Throughout their 1978 followup *Darkness on the Edge of Town*, Springsteen recharacterizes working class restlessness as a self-destructive impulse that drives the album’s characters into crime and compulsive thrill in a meager attempt at escaping from the endless grind of their working lives. In 1980 they released their biggest hit yet, "[Hungry Heart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boJhWtw-6Gg)" — a misleadingly upbeat lead single from *The River* in which a narrator tries to use restlessness as an excuse for suddenly abandoning his wife and kids. 

The title track of *The River* mines an even more devastatingly ordinary sense of realism in telling the story of a teenage couple whose relationship is eroded over the years by the whim of the volatile economic conditions around them. Like before, Springsteen dangles a symbol of escape — a nearby river where the couple used to swim in their honeymooning days — but after years of growing alienation it starts to become a symbol of a life they were never allowed to have, and a relationship that was doomed from the beginning. "Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?" Springsteen sings quietly in the climax, through clenched teeth. "Or is it something worse / That sends. me down to the river / Though I know the river is dry?"

Nebraska, released in 1982, was the first album Springsteen had ever recorded without the E Street Band. Assembled from a set of cassette demos Springsteen had recorded alone at home, the album’s stark and lonely acoustic landscapes matched an even bleaker assessment of poverty and the American Dream. Its characters — outcasts, outlaws, and children who seem doomed to become one or the other — speak through Springsteen with a soft and inarticulate reservedness about a world of  economic chaos and  violence that was both fundamental and inescapable. 

The album begins almost identically to *Born To Run:* the narrator pulls up to a house where a girl stands out front, and eventually they drive off together in an attempt to escape their prescribed lot in life. But where "Thunder Road" had found personal urgency in a vague sense of autobiography, "Nebraska" is a true crime story narrated from the perspective of real-life spree killer Charles Starkweather, a 19-year-old garbage collector who killed 11 people across Wyoming and Nebraska with his girlfriend in 1957 after his economic anxiety gave way to an epiphany that "dead people are all on the same level." 

Springsteen’s retelling withers the triumphant climax of "Thunder Road" into a resigned and uncertain declaration of inevitability: "They wanted to know why I did what I did," Springsteen murmurs. "Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world."

Born In The USA, Springsteen’s colorful and energetic 1984 reunion with the E Street Band, would become not only Springsteen’s best selling record, but one of the best selling records of all time. Culled largely from the same writing sessions as Nebraska, its fist-pumping maximalism only barely obscures the lyrics’ continued descent into economic fatalism.

Its widely-misinterpreted, largely ironic title track is really a seething indictment of the United States’ treatment of returning war veterans; even the bouncy pseudo-nursery rhyme chorus of "Working on the Highway" openly bears its total resignation ("Working on the highway, laying down the blacktop / Working on the highway, all day long I don’t stop"). "[Dancing In The Dark](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCFTL4IO6t4)," which won Springsteen his first GRAMMY in 1985, spins existential defeatism into something between a sad boy pickup line and a statement of solidarity: "I ain’t nothing but tired… Man I win’t getting nowhere / I’m just living in a dump like this," its narrator complains at first. "I’ll shake this world off my shoulders," he decides later. "Come on, baby, this laugh’s on me."

The album’s most subdued offering, "My Hometown," sheds the gentlest and most personal light on Springsteen’s hardened relationship to the conditions of the American working class as its narrator softly tangles nostalgic memories with an unflinching look at his hometown’s brutal history of racial tension and economic turmoil. When the town’s textile mill shuts down, putting a huge number of residents out of work, he finally decides to pack up his family and move away but implores his son to take one last look at where he comes from.

The second verse alludes to a real incident of racist violence that occurred in Springsteen’s own hometown of Freehold, New Jersey in the 1960s. Ironically, in 1986, two years after the song was released, Freehold closed its main manufacturing plant, a 3M factory, leaving hundreds of local laborers out of work. The Boss, at the height of his fame, returned home to perform at a benefit rally for the union workers being laid off, donating $20,000 himself. 

"Let me be your soul driver": 1987 - 1995

Over the previous 14 years, as Springsteen crawled out of Freehold and into success and stardom, the conditions for the American working class had grown steadily worse. His increasing urgency in portraying blue collar desolation during that period shows an innate understanding of that new development, in spite of his own escape. By the end of *Born In The U.S.A.,* Springsteen had arrived at a complex and difficult truth: You can’t change where you come from, and the lucky few who manage to escape their economic circumstances will always inherently be leaving a whole "town full of losers" — many of them family — behind. 

By the early 90’s Springsteen was living in Los Angeles with his family, and had unclenched his fists a little on the three solo albums (Tunnel of Love, Human Touch, Lucky Town) that followed Born In The U.S.A. In 1995, on the heels of his first Greatest Hits collection, Springsteen released The Ghost of Tom Joad — a spiritual sequel to Nebraska that applied its sense of stark isolation and themes of a broken American dream to stories that, in several cases, highlighted the experiences of undocumented immigrants.

The album won that year’s GRAMMY for Best Contemporary Folk Album, and proved just another dimension in the Boss’ legacy as an empathetic and unrelenting champion of the extraordinary bravery of ordinary folks persevering in thankless lives of hard work. Not long after, Springsteen decided to move back to New Jersey to raise his kids only a short drive away from where he grew up.  

"I am the nothing man": 2002-2014 

It would be seven years until Springsteen released his next album, *The Rising,* his first collaboration with the E Street Band in 18 years. Inspired by the September 11th attacks and at least one Asbury Park resident’s personal plea to Springsteen that "we need you now," *The Rising* intentionally finds a broader and more hopeful streak in its stories of ordinary people’s capacity for perseverance. 

Dense with simple and earnest affirmations ("we’re going to find a way" / "it’s going to be okay" / "I’m going to believe") that somehow manage never to feel naïve *or* condescending, Springsteen and the E Street Band begin to take a more deferential perspective. That view would continue through the aughts, as the band continued to look loss and destruction in the eye but reshift focus onto the immense bravery of their characters in the face of chaos and confusion. Though the band’s bleaker songs had certainly never lacked empathy, the determination to wear it more proudly on their sleeves in *The Rising* marked the beginning of a commercial and creative renaissance — one which  found Springsteen more comfortably inhabiting a role as a spokesperson for the ordinary people of an increasingly turbulent America.

During the 2004 Presidential election, Springsteen finally abandoned the pretense of separating his career and his partisan politics. He toured in support of Democratic nominee John Kerry; his 2005 solo album *Devils and Dust* empathizes, partly, with the disorienting experiences of soldiers fighting in the Iraq War; the next year, he used a record of Pete Seeger covers (*We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions)* to make his most opaque and comprehensive declaration of his populist political beliefs. 

2007’s Magic, a meditation on the erosion of personal freedoms in the Bush era, uses imagery of apocalyptic premonitions and magic tricks to tell stories about the inherent humanity of ignoring warning signs in an effort to believe someone who claims to have your best interests in mind. The complexity of that project — to characterize the era by attempting to empathize with, rather than denounce, the Americans who voted to re-elect Bush — feels perfectly Springsteenian in an era where political art was rapidly becoming the partisan battleground we continue to see today.

"We’ll meet at the house of a thousand guitars": 2019-present 

During the Obama era, Springsteen and the E Street Band released three albums that returned to familiar stories of working class perseverance, with an overall attitude of building back: *Working On A Dream* in 2009*, Wrecking Ball* in 2012, and *High Hopes* in 2014. Then after five years (his longest gap between albums since *The Rising)* he released an inspired and imaginative new highlight, *Western Stars* — a record written and arranged in the style of the orchestral country pop of Springsteen’s youth. 

This earnestness and more personal sense of nostalgia carried over into 2020’s Letters To You, an intimate and personal record inspired by the loss of longtime E Street Stalwarts Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici. In September 2022, Springsteen announced that his next record, Only The Strong Survive, would be a collection of cover songs from the classic songbook of his youth.

For any other artist of his stature and tenure, these nostalgic indulgences would probably indicate a sort of phoning-in — but for Springsteen they feel like a surprisingly immediate start to a new chapter. At worst, they’re a well-earned self-indulgence after countless albums of selfless advocacy and careful listening outside his own experiences; at best, they’re a reminder, after all that time, of his own deep and tightly-held ties back to the pantheon of characters in his songs. 

Either way, the path ahead is imminent proof of a career built on an organic ebb and flow of inspiration, imploring us to trust Springsteen in his pursuit and discovery of new forms of urgency and realism in his storytelling.

It wouldn’t be wild to argue that he’s earned that trust in his listeners. He is, after all, The Boss. 

Songbook: A Guide To Every Album By Guided By Voices' Current Lineup — So Far

2023 In Review: 10 Trends That Defined Rock Music
(L-R): blink-182, Phoebe Bridgers, Hayley Williams, Dave Grohl, Bruce Springsteen

Photo: Estevan Oriol/Getty Images, Taylor Hill/Getty Images, Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for The New Yorker, Kevin Mazur/Getty Images, Sergione Infuso/Corbis via Getty Images

news

2023 In Review: 10 Trends That Defined Rock Music

Rock acts young and old helped the genre stay alive in 2023. Take a look at 10 of the genre's most prominent trends, from early aughts revivals to long-awaited reunions.

GRAMMYs/Dec 11, 2023 - 05:32 pm

The rock scene may no longer be the dominant force it once was — blink-182's One More Time... is the only Billboard 200 chart-topper this year to predominantly fall under this category. But 2023 has still been an interesting and eventful period for those who like their guitar music turned up to eleven.

Over the past 12 months, we've had the two biggest groups of the Swinging Sixties returning to the fray in style, a new European invasion, and a wave of blockbuster albums that may well go down as modern classics. And then there's the revivals which will no doubt spark nostalgia in any kids of the 2000s, a resurgence in all-star line-ups, and a residency that could possibly change how we experience live music.

As we gear up for the holiday season, here's a look at 10 trends that defined rock music in 2023.

European Rock Traveled To America

From Lacuna Coil and Gojira to Volbeat and Rammstein, the Billboard charts aren't exactly strangers to European rock. But 2023 was the year when the continent appeared to band together for a mini invasion. Italian quartet Måneskin continued their remarkable journey from Eurovision Song Contest winners to bona fide rock gods with a Best New Artist nod at the 2023 GRAMMYs, a top 20 placing on the Billboard 200 albums chart for third album Rush!, and a Best Rock Video win at the MTV VMAs.

Masked metalers Ghost scored a fourth consecutive Top 10 entry on the Billboard 200 with covers EP Phantomime, also landing a Best Metal Performance GRAMMY nomination for its cover of Iron Maiden's "Phantom of the Opera," (alongside Disturbed's "Bad Man," Metallica's "72 Seasons," Slipknot's "Hive Mind," and Spiritbox's "Jaded"). While fellow Swedes Avatar bagged their first Mainstream Rock No. 1 with "The Dirt I'm Buried In," a highly melodic meditation on mortality which combines funky post-punk with freewheeling guitar solos that sound like they've escaped from 1980s Sunset Strip.

Age Proved To Be Nothing But A Number

The theory that rock and roll is a young man's game was blown apart in 2023. Fronted by 80-year-old Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones reached No.3 on the Billboard 200 thanks to arguably their finest album in 40 years, Hackney Diamonds, with lead single "Angry" also picking up a Best Rock Song GRAMMY nod alongside Olivia Rodrigo's "aallad of a homeschooled girl," Queens of the Stone Age's "Emotion Sickness," Boygenius' "Not Strong Enough," and Foo Fighters' "Rescued." (The latter two will also battle it out with Arctic Monkeys' "Sculpture of Anything Goes," Black Pumas' "More than a Love Song," and Metallica's "Lux Aeterna" for Best Rock Performance.)

The eternally shirtless Iggy Pop, a relative spring chicken at 76, delivered a late-career classic, too, with the star-studded Every Loser. And Bruce Springsteen, KISS, and Paul McCartney all proved they weren't ready for the slippers and cocoa life yet by embarking on lengthy world tours.

Death Was No Barrier To Hits

Jimmy Buffett sadly headed for that tropical paradise in the sky this year. But having already recorded 32nd studio effort, Equal Strain on All Parts, the margarita obsessive was able to posthumously score his first new entry on the Billboard Rock Chart since 1982's "It's Midnight And I'm Not Famous Yet."

But he isn't the only artist to have recently achieved success from beyond the grave. Linkin Park reached the U.S. Top 40 with "Lost," a track recorded for 2003 sophomore Meteora, but which only saw the light of day six years after frontman Chester Bennington's passing.

Perhaps most unexpectedly of all, The Beatles topped the U.K. charts for the first time since 1969 thanks to "Now and Then," a psychedelic tear-jerker in which surviving members McCartney and Ringo Starr brought previously unheard recordings from George Harrison and John Lennon back to life.

The Giants Stayed Giant

Foo Fighters also overcame the death of a core member on what many rock fans would consider this year's most eagerly awaited album. Drummer Taylor Hawkins, who passed away in early 2022, doesn't feature on the poignant but vibrant But Here We Are. Yet the two-time GRAMMY nominated LP still proved to be a fitting tribute as well as an encouraging sign that Dave Grohl and co. can extend their legacy:lead single "Rescued" became their 12th number one on Billboard's Main Rock Chart.

The Best Rock Album category for the 2024 GRAMMYs proves that veterans were alive and mighty in 2023. Along with the Foos' latest LP, the nominees include another Grohl-affiliated band,, Queens of the Stone Age's first album in six years, In Times New Roman..., Paramore's This Is Why, Metallica's 72 Seasons and Greta Van Fleet's Starcatcher.. (Metallica's 72 Seasons also struck gold with its singles, three of which landed at No. 1 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart, where lead single "Lux Æterna" spent 11 consecutive weeks on top.)

Of course, we also have to give a shout-out to U2. Not for March's Songs of Surrender album (for which they re-recorded 40 of their biggest and best tracks), but for the immersive, eye-popping Las Vegas residency at The Sphere which potentially reinvented the future of live music.

The Rock Supergroup Continued To Thrive

2023 spawned several new rock supergroups including Mantra of the Cosmos (Shaun Ryder, Zak Starkey and Andy Bell), Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee, and Better Lovers (various members of The Dillinger Escape Plan and Every Time I Die). But it was an already established all-star line-up that took the GRAMMY nominations by storm.

Consisting of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker, boygenius bagged a remarkable seven nods at the 2024 ceremony. Throw in a well-received headline set at Coachella, U.S. Top 50 follow-up EP, and even a "Saturday Night Live" showing alongside Timothée Chalamet, and the trio couldn't have asked for a better way to continue what they started together in 2018.

The Early 2000s Enjoyed A Revival

The cyclical nature of the music industry meant that the era of choppy bangs and super-skinny jeans was always going to come back into fashion. And following throwbacks from the likes of Olivia Rodrigo and Willow, the original punk-pop brigade returned this year to prove they could still mosh with the best of them.

Possibly the defining nasal voice of his generation, Tom DeLonge headed back into the studio with blink-182 for the first time in 12 years, with the resulting One More Time... topping the Billboard 200. Linkin Park ("Lost"), Papa Roach ("Cut the Line"), and a reunited Staind ("Lowest in Me") all scored No. 1s on the Mainstream Rock Airplay Chart, while Sum 41, Bowling For Soup, and Good Charlotte were just a few of the high school favorites who helped cement When We Were Young as the millennial's dream festival.

The Emo Scene Went Back To Its Roots

After channeling the new wave and synth-pop of the 1980s on predecessor After Laughter, Paramore returned from a six-year absence with a record which harked back to their mid-2000s beginnings. But it wasn't their own feisty brand of punk-pop that Best Rock Album GRAMMY nominee This Is Why resembled. Instead, its nervy indie rock took its cues, as frontwoman Hayley Williams freely admits, from touring buddies Bloc Party.

Paramore weren't the only emo favorites to rediscover their roots. Fall Out Boy reunited with Under the Cork Tree producer Neal Avron and old label Fueled By Ramen on the dynamic So Much (for) Stardust. And while Taking Back Sunday further veered away from their signature sound, the Long Islanders still embraced the past by naming seventh LP 152 after the North Carolina highway stretch they used to frequent as teens.

Country Artists Tapped Into Rock Sensibilities

We're used to seeing rock musicians going a little bit country: see everyone from Steven Tyler and Bon Jovi to Darius Rucker and Aaron Lewis. But the opposite direction is usually rarer. In 2023, however, it seemed as though every Nashville favorite was suddenly picking up the air guitar.

Zach Bryan repositioned himself as Gen-Z's answer to Bruce Springsteen with the heartland rock of his eponymous Billboard 200 chart-topper (which is up for Best Country Album at the 2024 GRAMMYs alongside Kelsea Ballerini's Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, Brothers Osborne's self-titled LP, Tyler Childers' Rustin' in the Rain, and Lainey Wilson's Bell Bottom Country). Meanwhile, Hitmaker HARDY — who first cut his teeth penning hits for Florida Georgia Line and Blake Shelton — leaned into the sounds of hard rock and nu-metal on his second studio LP, The Mockingbird & the Crow.

But few committed more to the crossover than the one of country's greatest living legends. Dolly Parton roped in a whole host of hellraisers and headbangers including Richie Sambora, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, and Rob Halford, for the 30-track Rockstar — her first rock-oriented project of her glittering 49-album career.

Post-Grunge Reunions Were Abundant

Fans of the mopey '90s scene known as post-grunge had all their dreams come true this year thanks to several unexpected reunions. Turn-of-the-century chart-toppers Staind and Matchbox Twenty both returned with new albums after more than a decade away. Creed, meanwhile, announced they'd be headlining next year's Summer of '99 cruise after a similar amount of time out of the spotlight.

The insatiable appetite for all things nostalgia, of course, means that any band — no matter how fleeting their fame — can stage a lucrative comeback. Take Dogstar, for example, the unfashionable outfit boasting Hollywood nice guy Keanu Reeves. Twenty-three years after appearing to call it a day, the Los Angeles trio surprised everyone by hitting the Bottlerock Napa Valley Festival before dropping a belated third LP, Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees and embarking on a headlining national tour.

The New Generation Gave The Old Their Dues

Say what you want about today's musical generation, but they know to pay respect where it's due., Olivia Rodrigo, for example, doffed her cap to '90s alt-rock favorites The Breeders by inviting them to open on her 2024 world tour.

New working-class hero Sam Fender invited fellow Newcastle native Brian Johnson to perform two AC/DC classics at his hometown stadium show. While ever-changing Japanese kawaii metalers Babymetal debuted their latest incarnation on "Metali," a collaboration with one of their musical idols, Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello.

Whether new artists are teaming up with the old or veterans are continuing to receive their flowers, 2023 proved that rock is alive and well.

2023 In Review: 5 Trends That Defined Hip-Hop

The Gaslight Anthem's Comeback Album 'History Books' Makes A Case For Meeting Your Heroes
Brian Fallon of The Gaslight Anthem

Photo: Taylor Hill/Getty Images

interview

The Gaslight Anthem's Comeback Album 'History Books' Makes A Case For Meeting Your Heroes

On 'History Books' — the Gaslight Anthem's first album in nine years — the New Jersey punks sound hungry again. Brian Fallon explains how friendship with Bruce Springsteen, dinner with Jon Bon Jovi and mental health inspired the band's latest.

GRAMMYs/Oct 25, 2023 - 03:00 pm

Seventeen years ago, Brian Fallon and the rest of the Gaslight Anthem — guitarist Alex Rosamilia, bassist Alex Levine, and drummer Benny Horowitz — were just trying to hold onto the dream. 

New Jersey’s communal culture of DIY punk brought them years of friendship and freedom from square jobs, but entering their late 20s, Fallon and co. had played in countless bands that flamed out or left them unfulfilled. Formed in 2006, the Gaslight Anthem was their final shot. "That’s why we called our first record Sink or Swim," Fallon tells GRAMMY.com. 

They swam. That 2007 debut signaled a sea change: In the early 2000s, punk bands were not repping Bruce Springsteen. They were absolutely not namechecking Tom Petty. Here was a punk band from the same streets as the Misfits, Bouncing Souls, and My Chemical Romance, writing great songs draped in the Americana of their parents’ generation. By the time the Boss himself joined Gaslight onstage at Glastonbury Festival 2009, their sophomore album The ‘59 Sound had made them one of the world’s most acclaimed new rock bands. 

The Gaslight Anthem mined its tried and true sound for two more albums,but half a decade of non-stop touring and creative pressure was starting to take its toll. 2014’s Get Hurt, a moodier record inspired by Fallon’s recent divorce, received mixed reviews. A year later, the band was on ice. They reformed in 2018 to perform 10-year anniversary shows for The ‘59 Sound but disappeared soon after. Fallon released singer/songwriter-oriented solo albums into the 2020s and kept in touch with his old bandmates, but it wasn’t the same. 

On Oct. 27, the Gaslight Anthem releases History Books, its first album in nine years. It’s an earthy, battle-tested rock record from a veteran band that sounds hungry again, their first self-released album after an amicable split with Island Records. The title track features a duet with Bruce Springsteen, the pair’s first studio collaboration after years of friendship. 

GRAMMY.com caught up with Fallon to discuss  what years of (humble) rock stardom brought him: a hard-earned appreciation for Gaslight Anthem’s past and a new understanding of the demons rattling in his brain.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

What made you want to get the band back together? 

I don’t think it was anything other than being inspired to write. I wouldn’t say that being inside for two years didn’t have a hand in that. At some point, you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, I had this band and we played big shows. It’s fun. A lot of people like it. It sounds like a good idea… I gotta do this. I have something else to say.

When the band was inactive, how much did the four of you stay in touch?

We don’t call each other every day, but we stayed current on the things going on in everybody’s life.

The whole thing is more about being friends. We’ve been through things no one else has seen. We’ve slept on floors in another country in a youth center with bugs crawling on you when you’re sleeping. And the only people that understand that are those other three. 

It’s been almost a decade since Gaslight Anthem released its last album, Get Hurt. Now that there’s some space to look back on it, why do you think the band went its separate ways after that album? 

We all felt that strain. In 2015, you couldn’t really say, as a musician, "Hey, I need to not be on tour because I’m going crazy. I need to sort my mental health out." People would just be like, "We’re going onto the next band. Bye. Your career is over." 

So when we pulled the plug, everyone was like, "Why are you doing this?" Well, so we don’t die. So we don’t hate ourselves, that’s why. We knew it wasn’t the band. We knew it wasn’t each other. I think we just needed to stop the landslide.

Do you think this had to do with being in the major label ecosystem? You came up releasing albums on punk rock labels, so I’m interested how you think it all compares.

I would love to sit here and tell you that the pressure is only in the major label world and that it’s the evil major label corporate overlords who do this to bands, but it is absolutely not. It comes from the smallest indie label of some dude in his basement, all the way up. My experience on majors was maybe even a little more sensitive. If you’re running a small label and you have excitement built up, you’re like, "Whoa! This is working on a big level!" You’re so excited that you’re like, "You gotta do this! You gotta do that!"

I’m not saying any of the labels we were on were like, "You gotta do this!," but there was definitely, "Well, if you don’t play this radio show, they’re not gonna play your record." 

Now, people are a little more in tune to what’s going on, but [10 to 15 years ago] for sure, it was like, this is your only opportunity ever! Well, no, it’s not the only opportunity ever. There’s other opportunities. 

Did it feel like people knew what to do with you at Island Records?

We had a real big champion at the time in the president, David Massey. He was the person who signed us. Bon Jovi and U2 had been on Island for a while and contemporary to us, was the Killers. Every time the Killers did something good, it gave us a little more freedom because they were the other rock band on the label. We liked [the Killers] and they liked us. They covered one of our songs ["American Slang"] at one of their shows in New York [in 2017]. It was like having a big brother on the label, paving a path. 

When we got back together, we weren't really on Island, but they could have made us make a record [for Island]. We don’t own anything. I don’t own [the masters for] Sink or Swim. I don’t own ‘59 Sound. Nothing. So we wanted to own it, now. We wanted to do our own label, with [independent distribution company] Thirty Tigers, where it’s much more of, "You’re the label, you make the decisions." 

How did "History Books" with Bruce come together?

I’m not one to shoot my shot, so to speak. Which has not been great for my career, I guess. But if somebody wants to do something for you, let them do it, you know? I never asked Bruce for anything. 

We were talking and I was saying, "Yeah, we’re putting the band back together and working on some songs." He just said, "Why don’t you write a duet for us?" I was like, "What? Alright!" You have to understand that, for me, sitting here and saying, "Why don’t you whip up a duet for me and Bruce Springsteen?" – that to me is like saying, "Why don’t I write a book for Ernest Hemingway? Why don’t I write Jimi Hendrix a guitar solo?" 

So I went away and I would say to myself, Alright, the next one is for Bruce. I’ll write the next song for Bruce. I just kept writing the songs to get them out, without the pressure. And at the end of it all, I just said, "Which song would Bruce sound good singing on?" Everybody just said "History Books." Cool! And then we sent it to him. 

What did he say when you sent him the song? 

He said, "Cool, I’ll get it done." He was in Dublin on tour and he just did it. 

After knowing him all these years, why do you think now was the time he proposed writing a song together?

With the band back and writing new material, it was just the right time. I don’t think there was a time before this where it would have been good for us to have done. 

Now, we’ve gone down a path enough to where we can embrace Bruce, New Jersey, our influences. We’re able to comfortably have that be our home.

When you’re around Bruce, do you get nervous? 

Imagine you’re seven years old, you’re reading your comic books, and then all of a sudden Batman jumps out of the comic book in your room and goes, "Hey, you wanna go fight crime tonight?" It’s insane to be in the presence of a person that’s that famous, and that influential to you. It’s not a thing a normal person can comprehend. And I can not comprehend this. 

Reading the lyrics to this album, I thought you were referencing your mental health a lot. Can you share what's been going on during the several years of your life?

It feels like everybody in America’s got things on their mind, especially the last couple years. I got to a point where the days felt like they were harder than they should have been. It’s like pushing a rock up a hill when you’re doing that every day, and you get tired. You’re dealing with stuff in your mind that you can’t quite… there’s not an event that causes you to feel a certain way. There’s no cause, so you can’t predict it. And that becomes extremely frustrating.

You turn to other things, or you get help and say, I don’t think I can do this on my own. I need someone else alongside me." That’s the point I got to. I got a therapist. There’s not a special rockstar line that people call, or if there is, I don’t have that number. I just went to the doctor and said, "I don’t feel right." 

Did these feelings get  buried during Gaslight Anthem’s more active years, only to come out during the pandemic when things got quieter?

I think it was coming anyway. Whether there was time to deal with it or not. The band slowing down before the pandemic was part of that, needing some time and space. That was why the band stopped, because it was like a steamroller. It’s like you have another mental illness, which is the anxiety of the pressure of feeling like you have to be excited. And that’s where the tidal wave starts… You feel guilty ‘cause you’re like, "I should be grateful. I’m in a band." And you are grateful, but you’re also struggling, and it’s freaking hard! 

[Mental health] comes up a lot in the song "Positive Charge"… I wrote it about that struggle. But this isn’t the mental health record. I’ve been writing long enough where I can steer the boat so it’s not a diary entry anymore. 

Back in 2021, you played a fundraiser in New Jersey alongside Jon Bon Jovi and Johnny Rzeznik from the Goo Goo Dolls. What was that like? 

We were doing a benefit for the reelection of the Governor of New Jersey [Democrat Phil Murphy]. Jon Bon Jovi reached out to my manager and wanted me to play. Whoopi Goldberg was hosting. Insane stuff. 

Jon Bon Jovi wanted to meet for dinner beforehand. At the same time, I was really thinking about the band. On the way in the car, I said to my wife, "I think I wanna get the band back together." I had not spoken of this prior, so this blew her mind. 

We sit down at the table, and it’s Jon Bon Jovi and John Rzeznik. I didn’t expect them to be familiar with my band, because they’re giant songwriters. They were just genuinely interested in what we had done, talking about the songs they liked. When we left, my wife was like, "That’s a sign. If there’s a sign, that’s a sign."

I’ve met famous people who are completely off the planet. They’re just not interested in having a normal conversation. They just revel in the absurdity of their fame. I could relate to [Bon Jovi and Rzeznik] because the one common denominator is we all came from nothing. And now we’re in bands that achieved some amount of success. 

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GRAMMY Rewind: Kendrick Lamar Honors Hip-Hop's Greats While Accepting Best Rap Album GRAMMY For 'To Pimp a Butterfly' In 2016
Kendrick Lamar

Photo: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

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GRAMMY Rewind: Kendrick Lamar Honors Hip-Hop's Greats While Accepting Best Rap Album GRAMMY For 'To Pimp a Butterfly' In 2016

Upon winning the GRAMMY for Best Rap Album for 'To Pimp a Butterfly,' Kendrick Lamar thanked those that helped him get to the stage, and the artists that blazed the trail for him.

GRAMMYs/Oct 13, 2023 - 06:01 pm

Updated Friday Oct. 13, 2023 to include info about Kendrick Lamar's most recent GRAMMY wins, as of the 2023 GRAMMYs.

A GRAMMY veteran these days, Kendrick Lamar has won 17 GRAMMYs and has received 47 GRAMMY nominations overall. A sizable chunk of his trophies came from the 58th annual GRAMMY Awards in 2016, when he walked away with five — including his first-ever win in the Best Rap Album category.

This installment of GRAMMY Rewind turns back the clock to 2016, revisiting Lamar's acceptance speech upon winning Best Rap Album for To Pimp A Butterfly. Though Lamar was alone on stage, he made it clear that he wouldn't be at the top of his game without the help of a broad support system. 

"First off, all glory to God, that's for sure," he said, kicking off a speech that went on to thank his parents, who he described as his "those who gave me the responsibility of knowing, of accepting the good with the bad."

Looking for more GRAMMYs news? The 2024 GRAMMY nominations are here!

He also extended his love and gratitude to his fiancée, Whitney Alford, and shouted out his Top Dawg Entertainment labelmates. Lamar specifically praised Top Dawg's CEO, Anthony Tiffith, for finding and developing raw talent that might not otherwise get the chance to pursue their musical dreams.

"We'd never forget that: Taking these kids out of the projects, out of Compton, and putting them right here on this stage, to be the best that they can be," Lamar — a Compton native himself — continued, leading into an impassioned conclusion spotlighting some of the cornerstone rap albums that came before To Pimp a Butterfly.

"Hip-hop. Ice Cube. This is for hip-hop," he said. "This is for Snoop Dogg, Doggystyle. This is for Illmatic, this is for Nas. We will live forever. Believe that."

To Pimp a Butterfly singles "Alright" and "These Walls" earned Lamar three more GRAMMYs that night, the former winning Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song and the latter taking Best Rap/Sung Collaboration (the song features Bilal, Anna Wise and Thundercat). He also won Best Music Video for the remix of Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood." 

Lamar has since won Best Rap Album two more times, taking home the golden gramophone in 2018 for his blockbuster LP DAMN., and in 2023 for his bold fifth album, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.

Watch Lamar's full acceptance speech above, and check back at GRAMMY.com every Friday for more GRAMMY Rewind episodes. 

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Songbook: A Comprehensive Guide To Tom Waits’ Evolution From L.A. Romantic To Subterranean Innovator
Tom Waits

From left: David Corio/Redferns; Paul Natkin/Getty Images; Scott Gries/Getty Images; Richard E. Aaron/Redferns

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Songbook: A Comprehensive Guide To Tom Waits’ Evolution From L.A. Romantic To Subterranean Innovator

As Tom Waits’ series of Island Records releases from the ‘80s and ‘90s are being reissued, take an album-by-album trip through the legendary singer/songwriter’s significant body of work.

GRAMMYs/Sep 20, 2023 - 06:44 pm

When Tom Waits warned on "Underground," the first song on his transformational 1983 album Swordfishtrombones, "there’s a rumblin’ groan down below," he very well could have been describing the artistic awakening that made him a legend.

Once an earnest yet good-humored singer/songwriter, Tom Waits is the rare artist in the past 50 years to successfully pull off something as radical as a complete artistic reinvention. A songwriter with a taste for the dark and grotesque as much as the theatrical, Waits has built up a catalog heavy on bizarre characters, morbid nursery rhymes, gruff junkyard blues and a uniquely unconventional take on rock music. And though it took some experimentation, trial and error and eventually getting married to arrive on the sound we hear today, he’s made a five-decade career of embracing sounds on the fringe and turning them into memorable melodies.

A Southern California native who got his start playing folk clubs in San Diego before relocating to Los Angeles in the 1970s, Tom Waits debuted as a relatively conventional singer/songwriter with a twinge of blues and jazz in his bones. And where his earliest records found him singing with more of a raspy croon, he adopted a vocal growl more spiritually akin to Louis Armstrong and Captain Beefheart. 

Waits never quite fit in alongside peers such as Jackson Browne or James Taylor. His instincts often pushed himself somewhere a little dirtier and darker, favoring tales of vagabonds and outcasts told with an inebriated sentimentality and irreverent humor. Throughout his decades-long career, the two-time GRAMMY winner never let go of the emotional honesty in his songwriting. 

Waits has joked that he makes two types of songs: grim reapers and grand weepers. The former became his staple sound in the 1980s after he married longtime creative partner Kathleen Brennan and began his decade-long tenure on Island Records, which still occasionally found him returning to the latter via less frequent but no less disarming ballads. 

What once was a songbook reflective of the bars and familiar streets evolved into surreal dens of iniquity and theaters of the grotesque. Waits' knack for storytelling and character development only strengthened over the years, even as his songs took more oddball and ominous shape. Swordfishtrombones' "Sixteen Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six" follows a hunter following a crow into a Moby Dick-like epic; spoken word standout "What’s He Building In There?," from 1999’s Mule Variations, prompts the listener to ponder who’s really up to no good. 

Though his record sales have been modest, Waits' songs have been covered by the likes of Rod Stewart and Eagles, and he’s collaborated with everyone from Bette Midler to Keith Richards. His songwriting and unique musical aesthetic have influenced records by Andrew Bird, Neko Case, Morphine and PJ Harvey.

As Waits’ acclaimed series of albums on Island Records from the ‘80s and ‘90s are being reissued in remastered form — some for the first time on vinyl in decades — GRAMMY.com revisits the legendary singer/songwriter’s significant body of work via each of his studio albums. Press play on the Spotify playlist below, or visit Apple Music, Pandora, and Amazon Music to enter Waits' sonic wonderland of '70s era  ballads and his plethora of twisted narratives and experimental sounds.

The Barroom Balladeer

Though often treated to his own idiosyncratic filter, Waits’ early output in the ‘70s reflected the glamor and sleaze of his Los Angeles surroundings. 

Closing Time (1973)

Making his debut at the height of the ‘70s singer/songwriter boom, Tom Waits revealed only slight glimpses of his myriad idiosyncrasies on 1973’s Closing Time. Heavily composed of ballads, the album’s sound is a result of a compromise between Waits’ own preference for more jazz-leaning material and producer Jerry Yester’s penchant for folk. 

Despite, or perhaps because of, that creative tension, Closing Time has a unique character. A sense of wanderlust and escape within its 12 piano-based songs feels like a jazzier, West Coast counterpart to Bruce Springsteen. Waits imbues the call of the road with a sense of melancholy on gorgeous opener "Ol’ 55" and gives a hefty tug at the heartstrings on the aching "Martha." He kicks up the tempo on "Ice Cream Man." Closing Time is often at its best when it’s more quietly haunting, like on the bluesy "Virginia Avenue."

Though the album didn’t initially garner much critical or commercial attention, it’s since become regarded as one of the finest moments of Waits’ early recordings. It also quickly earned the respect and admiration of other artists, with various songs from Closing Time being covered by Bette Midler, Eagles and Tim Buckley. 

The Heart of Saturday Night (1974)

After establishing himself with the romantic ballads of his debut album, Waits waded deeper into the waters of boho jazz and beat poetry in its follow-up, The Heart of Saturday Night. 

Waits shares his perspective from the piano bench and the barstool, occasionally delving into a sing-speak delivery against upright bass and brushed-drum backing. Throughout, Waits serves up colorfully embellished imagery about nights on the town and getting soused on the moon. Though not as experimental or sophisticated as some of his later recordings, The Heart of Saturday Night nonetheless finds Waits in a more playful mood, more overtly showcasing his sense of humor and penchant for a particular kind of down-and-out protagonist. Fittingly, the album's title track was directly inspired by Jack Kerouac.

The Heart of Saturday Night is somewhat autobiographical in that it’s one of the few albums that repeatedly features references to his youth growing up in San Diego. Most famously on "San Diego Serenade," as well as in his narrative of driving through Oceanside in "Diamonds on My Windshield," and his name-drop of Napoleone’s Pizza House, the pizzeria in National City where he worked as a teenager, in "The Ghosts of Saturday Night."

Nighthawks at the Diner (1975)

As Tom Waits further established himself as a singer/songwriter more at home in the naugahyde and second-hand smoke of a seedy nightclub than a folk festival, he sought to replicate the atmosphere of a jazz club on his third album. It’s not a live album in a literal sense; Waits invited a small crowd into the Record Plant studio in Los Angeles on two nights in July of 1975, and though the venue is artifice, the crowd reactions are genuine. 

More heavily rooted in jazz than Waits’ first two albums, Nighthawks at the Diner mostly follows a particular pattern: An "intro" track featuring some witty barfly banter, followed by an actual song. Introducing each song with a round of inebriated wordplay ("you’ve been standing on the corner of Fifth and Vermouth," "Well I order my veal cutlet, Christ, it just left the plate and walked down to the end of the counter…") is a bit of a gimmick, yet for all its loose, freewheeling feel, the album features some of his best early songs, including "Eggs and Sausage," "Warm Beer and Cold Women" and "Big Joe and Phantom 309." 

Releasing a manufactured live album early on proved a canny gambit for Tom Waits and resulted in his highest charting album up to that date. And it’s easy to see why: Nighthawks showcased the raconteur persona that’d come to define much of Waits' work to come. 

The Bluesy Bohemian

Embracing a grittier sound and a more character-driven approach to storytelling, Tom Waits entered a period of creative growth in the second half of the ‘70s that saw him balancing a darker tone with a wry sense of humor.

Small Change (1976)

On his second and third albums, a jazz influence and increasingly prominent humor saw Waits  developing not just as a distinctive personality, but as a character. His raspy growl deepened onSmall Change, as Waits'  barfly persona finds himself in increasingly seedier surroundings. This new area is  best showcased through the amusingly unsexy striptease scat of "Pasties and a G-String" and the surreal and misty eyed "The Piano Has Been Drinking."

Small Change isn’t nearly as jokey as the previous year’s Nighthawks at the Diner, but Waits carries a persistent smirk as he rattles through a laundry list of hucksterish advertising slogans in the carnival-barker beat jazz of "Step Right Up": "It gets rid of unwanted facial hair, It gets rid of embarrassing age spots, It delivers the pizza." He even ramps up an element of danger in the noir poetry of "Small Change (Got Rained on With His Own .38)".

Still, the heartache and romance remains within the album’s best ballads, including the gorgeous opener "Tom Traubert’s Blues" and the imagined depiction of a lonely waitress in "Invitation to the Blues." 

Foreign Affairs (1977)

Tom Waits’ fifth album Foreign Affairs unexpectedly became one of his most consequential releases. 

A rare Waits album that opens with an instrumental ("Cinny’s Waltz"), Foreign Affairs finds him taking on more narrative driven songwriting, as in the lengthy noir tale of "Potter’s Field" and the nostalgic road-movie recollection of "Burma-Shave." It seems fitting that this is the moment where Hollywood began to crack a door open for Waits — these songs sound like they were made for the silver screen. 

Indeed, album standout  "I Never Talk to Strangers," a duet with Bette Midler, inspired Francis Ford Coppola’s 1981 film One From the Heart. Waits wrote and performed on its  soundtrack, and would work with Coppola multiple times.

Blue Valentine (1978)

Parallels between Waits' music and his acting career crop up throughout , beginning with 1978’s Blue Valentine. Released the same year that he made his acting debut in Paradise Alley — cast as a piano player named Mumbles, an apt role to be sure — Blue Valentine opens with a big, cinematic number itself, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s "Somewhere," the famous ballad from West Side Story.

Blue Valentine also finds Waits in character development mode, increasingly populating his bluesy and bedraggled songs with widows and bounty hunters, night clerks and scarecrows wearing shades. It also features one of his most heartbreaking songs in "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis," in which Waits’ first-person epistle comes from the voice of the title character who reaches out to an old friend in a hopeful and warm update on the changes she’s made for the better. And then he seamlessly, devastatingly pulls out the rug from underneath it all, as only a fabulist like Tom Waits can. 

Heartattack and Vine (1980)

The transition from one decade to the next couldn’t have been starker for Tom Waits as he entered the 1980s. His final album for Asylum Records seemed to signal a sea change, with its leadoff track steeped in scuzzy, distorted guitar and gruff blues-rock rather than piano balladry, jazz and beat poetry.

Heartattack and Vine is in large part more of a proper rock record than any of Waits’ earlier albums, as he lends his husky growl to gritty songs such as "Downtown" and "In Shades." Still, it’s the most tender moments that comprise some of Heartattack and Vine’s most enduring songs, such as "On the Nickel" and, in particular, "Jersey Girl," covered four years later by the Garden State’s own Bruce Springsteen. 

The Avant-Garde Auteur

Tom Waits underwent a significant transformation in the 1980s, mostly leaving behind the smoky jazz-club ballads of the ‘70s in favor of a more avant garde take on rock music, rife with an arsenal of unconventional instruments. 

Swordfishtrombones (1983)

The most dramatic shift in Tom Waits’ career came with the release of 1983’s Swordfishtrombones, his first release for Island Records and the first album of what came to be the sound most often associated with Waits. It’s rougher, rawer, more experimental and offbeat. A great deal of the credit goes to Waits’ wife, Kathleen Brennan, who introduced him to artists like Captain Beefheart and who became his creative partner, co-writing many of his best-known songs. 

Waits trades the piano and strings of his earlier material for arrangements better fit for junkyard jam sessions and New Orleans funerals. Though he’s delivered a long list of releases that have since usurped such a title, Swordfishtrombones certainly sounded like his weirdest album at the time. Very little of it sounded like a conventional pop song;it’s interwoven with spoken-word pieces both hilarious and unnerving ("Frank’s Wild Years," "Trouble’s Braids"), instrumentals ("Dave the Butcher," "Rainbirds"), boneyard bashers ("Underground," "16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six") and even a few tender ballads ("Johnsburg, Illinois," "Town With No Cheer"). 

Though arguably far less commercial than anything he’d released prior, Swordfishtrombones still cracked the bottom half of the album charts. It also received the attention of critics, who praised Waits’ bold new direction and unconventional stylistic choices. 

Rain Dogs (1985)

For much of the 1970s, Tom Waits took inspiration from the seamier side of Los Angeles, with occasional sentimental nods to his youth further south along Interstate 5 in San Diego. With 1985’s Rain Dogs, however, he relocated to New York City to capture an even grimier and grittier album inspired by its outcasts and outlaws. 

Recorded in what was then a rough part of Manhattan in 1984, Rain Dogs continues the stylistic experimentation of Swordfishtrombones with an unusual array of instruments for a rock album, including marimba, trombone and accordion, the latter of which opens the title track in dramatic fashion with an incredible solo.

Rain Dogs also began Waits’ long collaborative relationship with Marc Ribot, whose guitar playing helps craft the album's signature sound. Through his Cuban jazz-inspired playing on "Jockey Full of Bourbon" and the scratchy and dissonant solo on "Clap Hands." Yet the album also finds him in the company of Keith Richards, whose licks appear on the album’s most famous song, "Downtown Train," which became a hit for Rod Stewart when he covered it in 1991.

Rain Dogs features Waits’ first co-writing credit from Brennan, brought dded gravitas to the aching ballad "Hang Down Your Head." It’s one of a few moments that cuts through the carnivalesque atmosphere of the album (see the demented nursery rhyme "Cemetery Polka," the crime-scene poetry of "9th and Hennepin" and the litany of misfortunes in "Gun Street Girl"). IRain Dogs is Tom Waits perfecting his approach, completing a stylistic transformation with one of his greatest batches of songs.

Frank’s Wild Years (1987)

One of the highlights of Waits’ 1983 album Swordfishtrombones was a humorous spoken-word jazz interlude wrapped up in a David Lynch nightmare, titled "Frank’s Wild Years," in which the titular Frank settles down into a suburban lifestyle, only to set his house on fire and drive off with the flames reflecting in his rearview mirror. Those 115 seconds or so were enough for Waits and Brennan to spin the idea out into a stage play, with this album serving as its soundtrack. (Its original cast at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre included Gary Sinise and Laurie Metcalf.) 

Frank’s Wild Years likewise comprises songs performed in the play, though without the context of knowing its origins, it doesn’t so easily scan as a set of songs written for the stage. It continues the aesthetic vision that Waits pursued on his two previous Island Records albums, steeped in Weill-ian cabaret and mangled lounge-jazz renditions, like in the hammy Vegas version of "Straight to the Top." Waits continues to run wild stylistically, however, veering from junkyard blues-rock in opener "Hang On St. Christopher" to the tenderness of the lo-fi 78-style recording of closing ballad "Innocent When You Dream."

Fifteen years after its release, "Way Down in the Hole," was given a second life as the theme for the HBO drama "The Wire," each season featuring a different artist’s rendition of the song. Waits’ original scores the opening credits for season two. 

Bone Machine (1992)

The title of Tom Waits’ tenth album fairly accurately sums up the sound of the record, which finds Waits incorporating heavier use of curious forms of percussion, many of them he played himself. Opening track "Earth Died Screaming" even resembles the sound of bones clanking against each other as Waits growls his way through an apocalyptic nightmare.

It’s fitting that Bone Machine coincided with Waits’ appearance as Renfield in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A macabre sensibility and grotesque narratives permeate this record:Acts of violence become a form of entertainment in "In the Colosseum," and he retells an actual story of a grisly homicide in "Murder in the Red Barn." There’s levity too, like in the delusions of a fame-seeker in the rowdy "Goin’ Out West," which, along with half the songs on the album, was co-written by Brennan.  

Eerie and macabre as Bone Machine is, it earned Waits his first  GRAMMYAward, for Best Alternative Music Album in 1993. Likewise, the Ramones covered standout track "I Don’t Wanna Grow Up" three years later on their final album ¡Adios Amigos!; Waits repaid the favor in 2003 with a cover of the band’s "Return of Jackie and Judy." 

The Storyteller’s Songbook

Deeper into the ‘90s and ‘00s, Waits became more active in writing music for the theatrical stage, albeit filtered through his own peculiar lens. He also closed out the ‘90s with his longest album, helping to usher in a late-career renaissance. 

The Black Rider (1993)

The soundtrack to a theatrical production,The Black Rider closed Waits' tenure with Island Records with the soundtrack to a theatrical production. Though his music appeared in films by the likes of Jim Jarmusch and Francis Ford Coppola, and he entered the world of theater with Frank’s Wild Years, this was his released  composed in collaboration with playwright Robert Wilson — they would work on three productions together — based on German folktale Der Freischütz. In fact, Waits affects his best German accent in the title track, in which he beckons, "Come on along with ze black rider, we’ll have a gay old time!"

Highlights "Flash Pan Hunter," "November" and "Just the Right Bullets" juxtapose distorted barks against ramshackle arrangements of plucked banjo, clarinet and singing saw. , The structure of the album — rife with interludes, instrumentals and reprises — sets it apart from any of his prior works, leaving room for the listener to fill in the visual blanks. 

Mule Variations (1999)

The release of Mule Variations coincided with the launch of Anti- Records, an offshoot of L.A. punk label Epitaph that was more focused on legacy artists in a variety of genres. This also resulted in the unlikely instance of a song by Tom Waits appearing on one of Epitaph’s famed Punk-O-Rama compilations, which typically featured selections by the likes of skatepunk icons NOFX and Pennywise. 

The longest studio album in Waits’ catalog, Mule Variations makes good on a six-year gap by being stacked with an eclectic selection of songs, most of them co-written with Brennan (who also co-produced the album). From the lo-fi beatbox bark that blows open the doors of leadoff track "Big In Japan," Waits essentially takes a tour through a disparate but cohesive set of songs that feels like a career summary, from tent-revival blues ("Eyeball Kid"), to devastating balladry ("Georgia Lee") and rapturous gospel ("Come On Up to the House"). 

A new generation of TikTok users received an introduction to this album via a meme featuring the album’s "What’s He Building In There?", an eerie spoken-word track from the perspective of a paranoid, busybody neighbor that became an unlikely viral sensation. 

Blood Money & Alice (2002)

 Another collaboration with playwright/director Robert Wilson, Blood Money and Alice were released on the same day in 2002. Co-written by Brennan, both are the soundtracks to  two plays, the former based on an unfinished Georg Büchner play Woyzeck and the latter an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland

Blood Money is darker and harsher in tone, kicking off with the satirically pessimistic "Misery is the River of the World," and featuring highlights such as the obituary mambo of "Everything Goes to Hell" and the charmingly tender "All the World Is Green."

Alice — whose songs had been circulated for years in bootlegs in rougher form — is more subdued and strange, its gorgeously lush and haunting opening ballad an opening into a head-spinning world of Lewis Carroll surrealism and disorientation. "Kommienezuspadt" soundtracks White Rabbit hijinks through German narration and Raymond Scott machinations, "We’re All Mad Here" lends a slightly darker shadow to an uneasy tea party, and "Poor Edward" diverts slightly from Carroll canon to visit the story of Edward Mordrake, a man born with a face on the back of his head. 

The Catalog Continues…

Though Waits hasn’t been quite as prolific in the past two decades as he had been from the ‘70s through the late ‘90s, he continued to refine and evolve his strange and uncanny sound, while sharing a triple-album’s worth of rare material that offered a wide view of his evolution over the prior two decades.

Real Gone (2004)

Waits maintained his prolific streak with the lengthy Real Gone, which featured 16 songs and spans nearly 70 minutes — just a hair shorter than his longest, Mule Variations. It’s also the rare Tom Waits album to feature no piano or organ, its melodies primarily provided via noisier guitar from Harry Cody, Larry Taylor and longtime collaborator Marc Ribot, along with contributions from Primus bassist Les Claypool and Waits’ own son, Casey, who provides percussion and turntable scratches. 

Real Gone is, at its wildest, the most abrasive record in Waits’ catalog, clanging and clapping and clattering through uproarious standouts such as the supernatural mambo of "Hoist That Rag," the CB-radio squawk of "Shake It" and creepy-crawly stomp "Don’t Go Into That Barn," one of his better scary stories to tell in the dark. He leaves a little room to ease back on dirges like the haunting "How’s It Gonna End" and the subtly gorgeous "Green Grass," but every corner of the album is populated by outsized characters and ominous visions that seem larger than ever.

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards (2006)

A career as long and fruitful as that of Tom Waits is bound to leave some material on the cutting room floor, the likes of which is compiled on the triple-disc set Orphans. Composed of non-album material that stretches all the way back to the 1980s, it’s divided into three distinctive themes: Brawlers, a disc of rowdier rock ‘n’ roll and blues material; Bawlers, a set of ballads; and Bastards, made up of what doesn’t fit into the other two categories — essentially Waits’ most fringe, peculiar music. 

In drawing the focus toward each distinctive type of songs, Waits lets listeners experience more intensive, discrete aspects of his music. It’s the "Bastards," however, that tap into the extremes of Waits’ unique talents, comprising strange and macabre storytelling, unintelligible barks, even a wildly distinctive take on "Heigh Ho," from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Some of these songs had previously been released in some fashion — many of them appearing on movie soundtracks as well as collaborative efforts like Sparklehorse’s "Dog Door" — Orphans  speaks to how productive he’s been over the past 40 years. 

Bad As Me (2011)

Tom Waits’ final album (so far) hit shelves 12 years ago, the aftermath of which opened up his longest stretch without any new music since he began releasing records. Yet Bad As Me only offers the suggestion that Waits still has plenty of energy and inspiration left in the tank, as the album — released when he was 61 years old — comprises some of the hardest rocking material he’s ever committed to tape. It’s an album heavy on rowdy rock ‘n’ roll guitar, including that of Keith Richards, who had also previously lent his guitar playing to 1985’s Rain Dogs, as well as longtime collaborator Marc Ribot and Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo. Waits mostly adheres to concise, charged-up barnburners such as "Let’s Get Lost," "Chicago" and the more politically charged anti-war song "Hell Broke Luce." Though when Waits does ease off the throttle on songs like the eerie "Talking at the Same Time," the results are often spectacular. 

If Tom Waits were to simply leave this as the end of his recorded legacy, it’d be a satisfying closing statement, though the closing ballad "New Year’s Eve" — ending on a brief round of "Auld Lang Syne" — would suggest new beginnings ahead of him. As it turns out, Bad As Me isn’t intended to be his last; earlier this year he confirmed that, for the first time in over a decade, he’s been working on writing new songs. 

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