I love a lot of Tom Waits' music, especially from the earlier stages of his career, so I thought I'd post this excerpt from today's edition of "The Writer's Almanac" (by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio in the U.S.):

It's the birthday of the singer, songwriter and actor Tom Waits, born in Pomona, California (1949). As a teenager, his parents moved around a lot, and instead of making friends, Waits became obsessed with music. He didn't listen to rock and roll like his classmates. He was more interested in older music: George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Frank Sinatra, Jerome Kern, Cab Calloway, and the old Nat "King" Cole Trio. He later said, "I... slept right through the '60s. Never went through an identity crisis. Never had no Jimi Hendrix posters on the wall, never ate granola, never had any incense."

Out of high school he worked odd jobs, as a fireman, a cab driver, a gas station attendant. He said, "[At one point] I worked in a restaurant... [as] dishwasher, waiter, cook, plumber, janitor—everything. They called me Speed-O-Flash." He wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life until 1968, when he read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. The book made him want to do something big, and a few weeks later he saw a local guy he knew playing jazz at a nightclub, and he realized that he needed to start making his own music.

Waits recorded a series of albums in the 1970's, but his breakthrough as an artist came in 1981 when he married the playwright Kathleen Brennan. He said, "She gave me the guts to just do it... …helped me open up and not be afraid to do something." He began to write concept albums about oddball characters, conmen, murderers and lunatics, and he often sang like a circus sideshow barker. Instead of using conventional piano or guitar, he filled his songs with tuba, pipe organ, accordion, and all kinds of percussion. It took him thirteen months to find a distributor for the first album in his new style Swordfishtrombones (1983) but when it finally came out, it was cited by many critics as one of the best albums of the year.

Waits has since begun to write for musical theater, including an operetta he wrote with William S. Burroughs called The Black Rider (1993), and the musical Alice (2002) loosely based on the life of the girl who inspired Lewis Carroll to write Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.