Spanning Tom Waits’ extraordinary 40-year career, from “Closing Time” to “Orphans”, “Lowside of the Road” is Barney Hoskyns’ unique take on one of rock’s great enigmas. Like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Waits is a chameleonic survivor who’s achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. From his perilous ‘jazzbo’ years in ’70s Los Angeles to the multiple-Grammy winner of recent years – by way of such shape-shifting ’80s albums as “Swordfishtrombones” – this exhaustive biography charts Waits’ life step-by-step and album-by-album. Affectionate and penetrating, and based on a combination of assiduous research and deep critical insight, this is a outstanding investigation of a notoriously private artist and performer – the definitive account to date of Tom Waits’ life and work.
Published by Faber and Faber
Due March 2009
About the Author
Barney Hoskyns is the co-founder and editorial director of online rock-journalism library Rock’s Backpages (www.rocksbackpages.com), and author of several books including Across the Great Divide: The Band & America (1993), Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, & the Sound of Los Angeles (1996), and Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys in the LA Canyons (2005). A former US correspondent for MOJO, Hoskyns writes for Uncut, The Observer Music Monthly and other UK publications, and has contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone and GQ. He lives in southwest London.
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