Song Noir

Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles

Häftad, Engelska, 2022

179 kr

Tillfälligt slut

Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits’s 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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2022-08-15
Mått148 x 210 x 22 mm
Vikt326 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieReverb
Antal sidor240
FörlagReaktion Books
ISBN9781789146639

Tillhör följande kategorier

Musiker, sångare och grupper inom Kultur
Tonsättare och låtskrivare inom Kultur
Populärmusik inom Kultur

There have been many Waits-related books, but Harvey's mission to recount and explain the resonance of his 10-year method-style immersion in LA's seedy underbelly is a winner thanks to his detailed research, noir-conscious writing style and fan's perspective on this uniquely complex artist. After meeting lifelong partner Kathleen Brennan changed his life, Waits left the city of his dreams to start his next phase with Swordfishtrombones. Those first wild years come to vivid life in this thorougly worthwhile addition to the Waits library.