The deadline is approaching for entries to the 2008 International Songwriting Competition, with the full list of judges just announced, including Tom Waits and Black Francis.
Ahead of Tom Waits' much-anticipated Dublin visit for three gigs this Wednesday July 30 – Friday August 1, organisers have released final stage time and ticket security information.
This immaculate 1973 debut remains, for casual fans, his most complete (and by far most accessible) album: Waits doled out his stories of love, regret and heartbreak like those emotions had just been discovered for the first time.
Someone once said that listening to a Tom Waits CD is more like watching a play than hearing an album. So seeing a Tom Waits show is perhaps akin to some abstruse sensory overload that, no matter how high the expectation, will bite you like a shark. The Carre Theatre in Amsterdam is a beautifully classic, large auditorium with retracting chandeliers and burgundy seats.
Someone once said that listening to a Tom Waits CD is more like watching a play than hearing an album. So seeing a Tom Waits show is perhaps akin to some abstruse sensory overload that, no matter how high the expectation, will bite you like a shark. The Carre Theatre in Amsterdam is a beautifully classic, large auditorium with retracting chandeliers and burgundy seats.
In a rare interview, US alt culture icon Tom Waits talks to Dave Fanning about touring with Zappa, getting the nod of approval from Dylan, his fastidious approach to songwriting and why Bill Hicks remains America’s foremost political commentator
The only problem with writing about any new Tom Waits record is the man himself describes his own work so accurately that any further attempts at conceptualism are rendered superfluous.
Alice and Blood Money are Siamese twinsets written by Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan for a stage production directed by Texan image alchemist Robert Wilson
A shaggy dog story: Tom Waits shows up at a Northern Californian studio, prospecting for premises close to home so that he can ferry his kids to and from school while working.
See him after midnight in the trailer-park: beside his fire with its strange aromas, the withered man with the parched voice and the piercing eyes with even stranger talismans on his jacket.
*Well, it's 9th and Hannepin/And all the donuts have/names that sound like prostitutes/And the moon's teethmarks are/on the sky like a tarp thrown over this...*
A misbegotten, footsore bone-crushing trek through the industrial badlands of Northern Germany finally left me in a single hotel room in Frankfurt uncorking a dutyfree bottle of Old Bushmills.
