Released in 1975, Tom Waits's third album was recorded at the Record Plant in Los Angeles before an invited audience. Tables, a bar and a small crowd helped turn a studio into a club for four shows over two nights. That arrangement is central to the record: its atmosphere was deliberately made.
Rain Dogs is Tom Waits’ ninth studio album, released in September 1985. It was written in a basement room at Washington and Horatio Streets in Lower Manhattan in fall 1984. It was recorded at RCA Studios in mid-1985. It features marimba, accordion, double bass, trombone and banjo. Waits rejected digital sampling, instead striking furniture with a two-by-four to create original percussion. Keith Richards and Marc Ribot both performed on the album. NME named it the best album of 1985.
Swordfishtrombones is Tom Waits’s eighth studio album, released in 1983 on Island Records. It marks his first self-produced record, written during a two-week trip to Ireland and recorded at Sunset Sound. It departs from piano-based songwriting and jazz idiom, introducing banjo, accordion, bass-marimba, metal aunglongs, African squeeze drum, calliope, and harmonium—and deliberately excludes saxophone. Lyrically, it shifts from intimate tales of drunkenness and heartbreak to surreal, geographically expansive stories about societal misfits. Asylum Records rejected the finished album. Critical reception was immediate and enduring, praising its originality and compositional daring.