GROSS: The arrangements for your songs are really good. And I guess I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things. It's really - a lot of it's really angry. So I said, well, I better start listening to this stuff. WAITS: Well, you know, I hadn't really listened to him until I had people tell me that I sounded somewhat like him or had some influence in there. Have you listened a lot to him? Do you feel like he's influenced your writing? GROSS: Some of your music writing seems influenced by the German songs of Kurt Weill. And the production was called "Woyzeck," and this is the - these are the songs from that. So this is the third thing that we've done with him. This was a project done with Robert Wilson, the avant garde theater director.
GROSS: Now, this music started as a music theater piece? TERRY GROSS: Tom Waits, welcome to FRESH AIR. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it always comes roaring back again. If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man. All the good in the world, you can put inside a thimble and still have room for you and me. The devil builds a chapel, like the thistles that are growing round the trunk of a tree. There's no milk at the bottom of the pail. TOM WAITS: (Singing) The higher that the monkey can climb, the more he shows his tail. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MISERY IS THE RIVER OF THE WORLD") Let's start with a song from "Blood Money." This is "Misery Is The River Of The World." Waits wrote those songs with his wife, Kathleen Brennan. This month, on the 20th anniversary of their release, those albums are being reissued on vinyl with new, formerly unreleased live versions of some songs. When Terry spoke with him in 2002, he'd just released two lyrical concept albums, "Blood Money" and "Alice," which are now considered some of his finest work. We're going to listen back to two of our interviews with Tom Waits.
His songs have been used on the soundtracks of several films, and he's acted in the movies "Down By Law," "Short Cuts," Francis Ford Coppola's "Dracula," "The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs" and "The Old Man & The Gun."
He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. The darkness of his lyrics is accentuated by the rumble and rasp of his voice, a voice that sounded old even when he was young. The people he usually sings about are loners, losers, hobos, outlaws and drunks. There's always been an element of mystery surrounding his life. The New York Times once described him as the poet of outcasts. Tom Waits is one of the true eccentrics of pop music. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television studies at Rowan University in New Jersey, in for Terry Gross.
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