Song Noir

Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits’ career, when he lived, wrote and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles; from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time (1973), to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones (1983). Starting his song-writing career in the ’70s, Waits absorbed LA’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 la as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.

‘One can easily make the argument that musician, songwriter, and actor Tom Waits is the consummate chronicler of down-and-out life in Los Angeles. Producer, director, and critic Harvey describes the busy first decade of Waits’ idiosyncratic career and his nine Los Angeles-themed albums…Beautifully written, Song Noir is a fascinating and compelling read featuring striking and evocative black-and-white photographs.’ – Booklist

‘In Song Noir, Harvey brilliantly reconstructs the colorful characters and grimy street life in Tom Waits’s head. Song Noir guides us through Waits’s evolution as an artist in parallel with the dark shades of Los Angeles in the 1970s, a world that helped shape his songs and ultimately his very persona. Harvey manages to craft a glimpse into Waits’s creative process, a swirling cauldron of sorts where Bukowski, Kerouac, Raymond Chandler, and all the tragic victims from the pages of noir come to life, showing us the arrival and progression of Tom Waits the artist, with his rich cinematic vision in full bloom.’ – Tree Adams, composer

Author Biography

Alex Harvey is a producer and director of programs including Panorama and The Late Show for the BBC. His films include The Lives of Animals and Enter the Jungle. Based in Los Angeles, he regularly writes on literature, film, and music for the London Review of Books and Los Angeles Review of Books.