Tom Waits: A Poet of Outcasts Who's Come Inside

Sunlight wouldn't seem to be Tom Waits's element. His songs tend to take place in rainy nocturnal realms filled with outcasts and freaks, where his slurred gargle of a voice and his junkyard assortment of sounds won't upset passers-by. Yet there Mr. Waits was on a bucolic northern California afternoon a few weeks ago, lunching on minestrone soup in a small-town restaurant near his home, and talking affably about how he has created and maintained his own peculiar zone — more like a back room or a bunker full of debris — in American music.

"I just try to walk my own path," he said. "You have to believe in yourself and you have to ride out the seasons. Everybody wants it to be summer all the time, in relationships and with their career. And when the weather starts to turn, they think they better get out. So it takes a certain amount of persistence."
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thanks to random walks

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Both Blood Money and Alice are available at Emusic for download as MP3s — for subscribers. They also have Mule Variations.