Mama Miriama Band

In these years when really begins to weave the character and legend of Tom Waits as we know it today. In 1980 he meets Kathleen Brennan, script reader and editor during the filming of the Heart. A year later he married her and her presence in Waits’ music will be crucial from this point. It is she who leads him to new creative limits and with whom co-wrote many of his great works. Until then Tom Waits had not gone beyond small circles, though respected, had not enjoyed mainstream success. That success would come in this decade that musically Swordfish trombones opens in 1983 with the first album of a new era and a new sound. Although, as in many of the anecdotes of his life, not sure whether is real or not, some people recommended Brennan says Captain Beefheart and made him see that it was necessary to look at himself and live-their heartbreaking stories.

The main character is not Waits, but his stories and those who inhabit it. In the meantime, has been refined, minimizing and sharpening the sound of Kurt Weill to suit your sound. It is also the moment he begins to sing with his particular brand of growling and recite, and his first experience as a producer. Still, there are still remnants of its previous time on issues like Johnsurg, Illinois or Soldier’s Thing. In Swordfish trombones brings together all the signs of what later became the epicenter of the explosion of talent here and from Tom Waits applied in one form or another experimental treatment to its amalgam of sounds of the American tradition.

At Rain Dogs, 1985, Waits himself explained the title as follows: “… the rain will clean everything in their path in their direction. So everyone in the album are joined by some corporeal way to share the pain and discomfort. ” On this album takes a tour of all leathery and gloomy streets of New York, placing the town center stage not only as stories, but as protagonists. When many chose in those years by the electronics this man showed it was possible to experience without resorting to it.

Frank’s Wild Years, 1987, was intended as a musical play of the same name, and share title and be inspired by a song from Swordfish trombones. This work is one of the most lucid and bitter visions of America’s most somber, the losers that populate withered and emaciated alleys. A disc is absolutely heartbreaking in areas such as Temptation, the very version Way Down in a Hole, who was head of The Wire, I’ll be Gone, Cold Cold Ground or Innocent When You Dream splendid.

It was not until a few years until their next studio release, Bone Machine, 1992. A truly exceptional work in which all experimental follies have a room for clothing and fiercely sinister stories almost overwhelming. On this album, probably the most compact of this time, all his work of 80 takes the form of an abrupt sound, almost primitive, very distorted and downright frightening on many occasions on issues like Dirt in the Ground or Jesus Gonna Be Here.