My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (10) Swordfishtrombones - Tom Waits

[This is the first in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

At least as early as 1982, in an article reporting on his involvement with the soundtrack to the Francis Ford Coppola film One from the Heart, Tom Waits was referred to as a "Hobo Laureate." The honorific has followed him throughout his career, and must be among the most appropriate in all of popular music: everything about Waits' stage persona, from his appearance to his voice, mannerisms, and subject material, suggests either a personal history of homelessness, or else a consistent fascination with the subject. In 1982, Waits found himself at a crossroads, having been dropped from Asylum Records and seeking a new musical formula. Coincidentally, 1982 also marked the last recorded output of the closest thing American popular music had to a Waitsian precursor, Captain Beefheart. Waits and Beefheart had always held much in common: beyond the bottom-of-the-ribcage growls heard throughout their catalogs, both artists had shared an interest in the blues in their most brutal and elemental form, as well as a fondness for spinning musical yarns about the dwellers of societal margins. Prior to signing with Island Records, the music accompanying Waits had always been fairly conventional. The result had been albums like 1975's Nighthawks at the Diner - strong showcases of a highly original talent that nonetheless sounded as though they'd been produced by a peculiarly unhinged Billy Joel.

1983's Swordfishtrombones fulfilled all of Waits' promise in one fell swoop. Abruptly, the bed on which Waits' music rested was found to be as attention-grabbingly bizarre as the artist himself. The result was an exotic exploration of the world’s castoffs, from members of a subterranean society (the lurching stomp of "Underground") to a man who snaps under the pressures of suburban mediocrity (the painfully funny "Frank's Wild Years," later expanded into a concept album). Appropriately, most of the proceedings are very percussion-heavy. Waits sounds invigorated on the album's title track over the marimbas, whose ringing cadences provide an intriguingly shifty soundscape without sacrificing the atavistic sound integral to the artist's appeal. Elsewhere, melodic instruments serve a similar function. The bagpipes of "Town with No Cheer" and the Gary Lucas-esque guitars that ring throughout the album certainly echo latter-day Beefheart, but they also help announce Waits as a musician who's finally perfected accommodating his own eccentricities. Indeed, Swordfishtrombones represents perhaps the pinnacle of Waits' songwriting: his ballads, such as the superlative "Soldier's Things," maintain the sterling quality found throughout his Asylum years, while songs like "16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six" show him to also be uncompromising on harder-edged material. The critical acclaim of Swordfishtrombones and its outstanding follow-up, Rain Dogs, would reinvigorate Waits' career, and he has scarcely released an album over the last three decades to anything less than universal acclaim. Swordfishtrombones, however, continues to mark the boldest jump of Waits' career - an album that propelled him permanently into the vanguard of popular music, and one of the most impressive, cohesive statements of the decade.