![]() ![]() These are no longer the kind of affectionately-observed barflies with hard luck stories who you want to drink with the dramatis personae of Swordfishtrombones are a much darker, wilder, less predictable and infinitely less romantic bunch. ![]() The Salvation Army band sound that made “Ruby’s Arms” so nostalgically beguiling is channeled again on the waltz-time “In the Neighborhood,” while the unabashed sentimentality of “Jersey Girl” becomes the quieter and more nakedly intimate “Johnsburg, Illinois.” When it comes to the characters that people Swordfishtrombones though, Waits casts his net far wider and deeper than the next whisky bar that he had rhapsodized about in his earlier work. There are plenty of blues influences on Swordfishtrombones, most notably “Gin Soaked Boy,” by far Waits’ most authentic if wired take on the traditional Delta blues style. The sound and atmosphere of Swordfishtrombones feels so different from the blues-rock-inflected Heartattack and Vine that it’s surprising, on closer examination, to see how much musical and lyrical continuity there is between the albums. With his recent marriage to Kathleen Brennan, Waits had gained a different kind of freedom from the footloose freedom of a Beat-era vagrant with the result that although he was now in a stable relationship and a permanent home, he often sounds like a man living in a burned-out car in the woods. The real-life background to Swordfishtrombones was a newfound stability. On his then-most recent albums, Blue Valentine and Heartattack and Vine, Waits had told sympathetic stories of losers, drifters and bums while sounding exactly like what he was a man living his own precarious, Bukowski-esque existence in a seedy motel. Up until 1980’s Heartattack and Vine, that’s a fair observation, but Swordfishtrombones is the point at which it becomes redundant, in part because it was also the point where he began to distinguish more clearly between himself and the other personae he inhabited in his work. The standard journalistic wisdom of the ‘70s, outlandish as it may seem now, was that Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen wrote about the same kind of street people, but whereas Springsteen observed them from the outside, Tom Waits inhabited the characters that he wrote about. The clattering, ramshackle percussive songs, the sentimental Victorian-style ballads, the wise-and-wizened croak, the expressionistic roar all of that started here, and as a collection of songs, he has rarely if ever bettered it. For Waits, this transformation represented real artistic freedom, and Swordfishtrombones provides the blueprint for everything he has done since. ![]() It’s almost as though the layers of period-color varnish that Waits and his old producer Bones Howe used to give his ‘70s records their distinctive booze-and-tobacco patina had been overzealously attacked with paint stripper, peeling back the layers but disfiguring the person underneath in the process. Although Waits’ musical style underwent a major transformation, it wasn’t a clean slate the jazzy, boozy, down-at-heel beatnik/bohemian persona he adopted in the first phase of his career was still there, and he appears from time to time, albeit in a slightly more feral and threatening way. But the observation is both apt and misleading. To give an idea of the radical change that Swordfishtrombones marked in Tom Waits’ work before the release of the album in 1983, the artist he was most frequently compared to was Bruce Springsteen afterwards it was Captain Beefheart. ![]()
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