Song noir : Tom Waits and the spirit of Los Angeles
Harvey, Alex2022
Books
'Song Noir' examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits's career, when he lived, wrote, and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles: from his soft, folk-inflected debut, 'Closing Time' in 1973, to the abrasive, surreal 'Swordfishtrombones' in 1983. Starting his songwriting career in the seventies, Waits absorbed Los Angeles's wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city's literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. Waits mined a rich seam of the city's low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. Mixing the domestic with the mythic, Waits turned quotidian, autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic, a vision of Los Angeles as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.
Main title:
Song noir : Tom Waits and the spirit of Los Angeles / Alex Harvey.
Author:
Harvey, Alex, author
Imprint:
London : Reaktion Books, 2022.
Collation:
240 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm.
Series title:
ISBN:
9781789146639 (pbk. :)
Language:
English
Subject:
BRN:
302877