Tom Waits (born Thomas Alan Waits, in Pomona, California, on December 7, 19… Read Full Bio ↴Tom Waits (born Thomas Alan Waits, in Pomona, California, on December 7, 1949) is a prolific American singer, songwriter, composer, and actor.

He started his career in the early 1970s as a singer in spit 'n' sawdust bars. Initially, he was deeply influenced by the beat generation, novelists like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, and poets like Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski. Waits is often compared to Charles Bukowski, being similar both in content and lifestyle

Waits was unable to make a living from his music in the 70s because his classical bar music, based in pre-rock, and Americana, blues, and Vaudeville styles were not popular. Waits's voice back then was soft, warm and clear.

Waits subsequently developed a devoted cult following and has influenced subsequent songwriters, despite having little radio or music video support. In fact, his songs are perhaps best known to the general public in the form of cover versions of more visible artists, such as the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen and Rod Stewart.

Although Waits’s albums have met with mixed commercial success in his native United States, they have occasionally achieved gold album sales status in other countries.

Lyrically, Waits's songs are known for atmospheric portrayals of seedy characters and places; he sings about the losers on the streets: alcoholics, junkies, prostitutes and social outcasts, although he also includes more conventional and touching ballads in his repertoire.

While opening for Frank Zappa, the audience catcalled and refused to listen to him; he was an unsuitable match with Zappa's avantgarde style.

Countless cigarettes, gallons of alcohol and many all night parties eventually left their trace in his face and voice.

His more recent gravelly voice can be first heard on Small Change. This distinctive voice turned out to be his trademark. It is described by the Music Hound Rock Album Guide as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car". Small Change with its sentimental ballads, its bar-jazz attitude and Film Noir-oriented stories turned out to be his biggest commercial success in the 1970s.

Waits subsequently developed a more unique style. His songs have grown more abrasive since then, and the arrangements have turned more surreal and experimental with every new record. His life brings him to new visions, as indicated by the direction taken in his "Alice" release.

While composing the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola's One From The Heart Waits met Kathleen Brennan, his bride-to-be. They married in 1980 and she helped him quit drinking and smoking. Since their marriage they have been working together on his albums as co-producers and co-writers. It is hard to say which part belongs to her and which to him, but it's easy to see that they make a perfect team. Additionally, his eldest son Casey can be heard on turntables and percussion on Waits's album "Real Gone".

One of Waits's greatest successes was the album "Swordfishtrombones", released in 1983. It struck with his critics and fans alike. He achieved a new level of song writing and left former conventions (and his earlier career) behind. All songs, whether ballads, jive or jazz are played in a completely different way. It seems that Waits had taken the musical archetypes of these styles and made them his own. All tracks are in the quintessential Waits style. They have a striking rawness and listenability and they set the stage for his success and his future career.

The Bad As Me Songfacts reports that 36 years after the release of Waits' first album, Closing Time in 1973, Bad As Me became Waits's first ever top 10 album in the US when it debuted at #6 with 63,000 sales.

In the late 1980s Waits discovered an outlet for his creativity in composing musicals. His first Musical was named "The Black Rider", and is based on "Der Freischütz" by Carl Maria von Weber. It was co-produced by Robert Wilson and the lyrics come from William S. Burroughs. The story is slightly reminiscent of Kurt Weil's and Berthold Brecht's "Three Penny Opera" and the 1930s. The debut performance of the play was in 1990 at the Thalia Theater, Hamburg and has been played by various theatre groups since then.

Waits was also responsible for two other musicals, which later became albums released simultaneously in 2002. One was the musical "Blood Money," which covers the "Woyczek" theme of Georg Büchner. This one is one of the darkest works from Waits. The other musical is based on Lewis Carroll's classic children's novel, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". "Alice" is very romantic, dreamy and soft, and contains one of Waits most romantic songs. Even though they were released at the same time, the bootlegs of the "Alice" musical were long before traded between fans and were just rearranged and re-mastered for the official release.

Besides many film contributions as composer – the Internet Movie Database imdb.com lists 47 appearances of Waits as composer and 38 soundtracks containing songs by Waits - he also is an actor with a total of 25 appearances, ranging from some mini-roles as a trumpeter in "Heart of Saturday Night" and the R. M. Renfield in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" to the major role of Zack in Jim Jarmusch's "Down by Law". He recently appeared in Roberto Benigni's "The Tiger and the Snow", playing You Can Never Hold Back Spring at Benigni's wedding dream. Even more recently, Waits played Mr.Nick (the Devil) in Terry Gilliam's "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus".

In addition to a number of concert videos, he also appeared in the critically-acclaimed concert feature film "Big Time" (1990).

Waits has always refused to allow the use of his songs in commercials. He has filed several lawsuits against advertisers for using his material without permission. Waits also successfully sued an advertiser for using a work that was stylistically similar to his work, after he had declined to sell them the rights to his song. He has been quoted as saying, "Apparently the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad — ideally naked and purring on the hood of a new car. I have adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor."

We're All Mad Here
Tom Waits Lyrics

Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴

You can hang me in a bottle like a cat
Let the crows pick me clean but for my hat
Where the wailing of a baby
Meets the footsteps of the dead
We're all mad here
As the devil sticks his flag into the mud
Mrs Carol has run off with Reverend Judd
Hell is such a lonely place

And your big expensive face will never last

And you'll die with the rose still on your lips
And in time the heart-shaped bone that was your hips
And the worms, they will climb the rugged ladder of your spine
We're all mad here
And my eyeballs roll this terrible terrain
And we're all inside a decomposing train

And your eyes will die like fish
And the shore of your face will turn to bone

Overall Meaning

The lyrics of Tom Waits's We're All Mad Here are haunting and surreal, painting a picture of a grim and insane world. The first two lines suggest that the singer's body is disposable as he compares himself to a cat in a bottle, and implies that the only thing he values is his hat. The following lines portray different grotesque images of death as the singer expresses that even a baby's cry is consumed by the sounds of death. Thus, we are in a world of madness and decay.

The second stanza introduces two characters - Mrs. Carol and Reverend Judd - that have disappeared, and this pair's abrupt exit further emphasizes the strangeness of the world. The singer describes hell as a lonely place, and suggests that even the most beautiful face will eventually decay. The final stanza describes the physical decay of the singer's own body, with his eyeballs rolling as if lost and his body decomposing on a train. The singer's ultimate demise is described as fish dying, and his face becoming nothing but bone.

Overall, We're All Mad Here illustrates a bleak and despairing world in which we must all face madness, inevitability of decay, and the prospect of death.

Line by Line Meaning

You can hang me in a bottle like a cat
I may be small and insignificant, easy to contain, control, and discard.

Let the crows pick me clean but for my hat
Even after I am dead and forgotten, my identity may persist as a scrap, a souvenir, or a mystery.

Where the wailing of a baby
In the face of raw and primal human emotion, vulnerability, and dependence.

Meets the footsteps of the dead
When the cycle of life and death, hope and despair, birth and decay collide and overlap, revealing a wider reality.

We're all mad here
None of us conform to the norms, expectations, or logic of a sane, stable, and predictable society, and that's okay.

As the devil sticks his flag into the mud
The forces of evil, chaos, and corruption seem to triumph or claim their territory, leaving us vulnerable, frustrated, or powerless.

Mrs Carol has run off with Reverend Judd
The social conventions and moral standards that we rely on may be fragile, hypocritical, or deceptive, leading to scandal, confusion, or betrayal.

Hell is such a lonely place
Even if we are surrounded by others, we may feel isolated, alienated, or disconnected from them, our selves, or our purpose in life.

And your big expensive face will never last
No matter how much we value our appearance, status, or possessions, they are ephemeral, vulnerable, and irrelevant in the face of time, decay, and death.

And you'll die with the rose still on your lips
Even at the moment of death, we may hold on to a shred of beauty, desire, or hope, but it may be futile, ironic, or poignant.

And in time the heart-shaped bone that was your hips
Our physical attributes may symbolize our uniqueness, our sensuality, or our mortality, but they also reveal our common ancestry, our frailty, and our impermanence.

And the worms, they will climb the rugged ladder of your spine
The organic matter that we are made of may be recycled, consumed, and transformed by other organisms, creating a gruesome but essential cycle of life and death.

And my eyeballs roll this terrible terrain
As a witness to the strange, absurd, and terrifying aspects of human existence, I am overwhelmed, disoriented, and fascinated.

And we're all inside a decomposing train
As passengers of life, we are moving towards an inevitable end, sharing the same fate, the same journey, and the same meaninglessness.

And your eyes will die like fish
Even the most expressive, alive, and vital parts of us may lose their luster, their energy, and their relevance, as we succumb to time, fatigue, and apathy.

And the shore of your face will turn to bone
The superficial, aesthetic, and social aspects of our identity may contrast or collapse with the deeper, essential, and spiritual aspects of our being, as death strips us of our masks, roles, and illusions.

Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
Written by: KATHLEEN BRENNAN, THOMAS ALAN WAITS

Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind

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