Tom Waits
Rain Dogs

THE REVIEW

An outsider, a stranger. Someone who approaches a universe that is not their own, trying to understand, comprehend, and assimilate it. Perhaps an arduous task, but the reward is great: to have something new to love. Personally, I felt that way about Tom Waits when I first approached his music, as my usual listening habits were far removed from what the quintessential American rebel has been offering for so many years. A controversial figure, Thomas Alan Waits. A character who has made his life and his music a constant battle against the illusions of his homeland, the hidden loneliness of his hypocritical and suffocating reality. Born in California in 1949, he is, among the musicians of our time, the ultimate nonconformist genius, representing someone who has detached themselves from everything that the society surrounding him could offer. Almost a play on words, his name, for someone who has never waited for anyone in life.

We are in 1985: the fourteenth album in his intense career, "Rain Dogs", although not his best album in my modest opinion is one of the most representative of his genius because it manages to glimpse at ground level his heart, that which is his tormented soul beneath the apparent emotional serenity of the Blues, under the dark atmospheres of the Title-Track, under the subtle irony of "Singapore" or "Cemetery Polka." It is simply impossible not to shed a small tear listening to his voice, a cigarette lasting years, the voice of all the hobos in the world, the voice of those dogs who, caught by the storm, no longer know how to find their way home... Rain Dogs, indeed. It matters little whether the emotion you feel will be in hearing the slightly jazzy Rock of "Big Black Mariah," where Keith Richards supports Waits' vocals with his guitar, or in the slow and moving notes of the wonderful "Time," in the relaxed cadences of "Gun Street Girl," or in an ovation-worthy piece such as "Clap Hands."

The important thing is to be moved and to do so with the awareness of listening to a tremendous artist who in a work like this manages to mix the singer-songwriter tradition, classic Blues, Rock, and Gospel to bend them to his will, to the propaganda of his poetic word. I would like to continue spending words on this work but I believe it is useless given my acknowledged inadequacy to describe it in detail. It is an album that rivers of words have been spilled over, and I certainly do not feel obliged to add mine. For this reason, I didn't even want to talk about the lyrics, street poetry; it may seem silly, but quoting some of them here would be like doing a disservice to all the others, so I limit myself to highly recommending their reading. To be listened to, assimilated, understood, and loved: and this is said by a metalhead.