album rating: ★★★★☆
Genre: Experimental rock / avant-garde / cabaret / blues / art rock. Swordfishtrombones is the eighth studio album by Tom Waits (born Thomas Alan Waits, Pomona, California, 1949), released in 1983 on Island Records. It is one of the most decisive pivots in the history of popular music: the album on which Waits abandoned the smoky jazz-piano-and-broken-hearts persona of his first seven Asylum Records albums and invented an entirely new musical language — one drawing on German cabaret, Harry Partch's microtonal percussion, Captain Beefheart's dissonant blues, Salvation Army brass, circus calliopes and the patina of scratched 78rpm records. It was the first album Waits produced entirely himself. His marriage to Kathleen Brennan, to whom the album is dedicated, was the decisive creative catalyst: she introduced him to avant-garde influences — particularly Captain Beefheart and Harry Partch — and encouraged a more radical compositional approach. Waits wrote the material during a two-week trip to Ireland and recorded it in August 1982 at Sunset Sound in Hollywood. One track, 'Dave the Butcher', was recorded at Leeds Instrument Rental. The album was mastered at Kendun Recorders. It took Waits thirteen months to find a label willing to release it after completion; Asylum, his previous label, had refused. Island Records eventually agreed. Musicians include bassist Greg Cohen, bassist Larry Taylor, and percussionist Victor Feldman. The instrumentation is wholly unconventional: banjo, accordion, bass marimba, metal aunglongs, African squeeze drums, calliope and harmonium replace the piano and saxophone of earlier albums. The fifteen tracks include 'Underground', 'Shore Leave', '16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six', 'In the Neighborhood', 'Soldier's Things', 'Frank's Wild Years' and the title track. The cover photograph shows Waits with actors Angelo Rossitto and Lee Kolima.
Label: Island Records, released 1983.
Producer: Tom Waits (first self-produced album).
Recording studios: Sunset Sound, Hollywood, California (August 1982), except 'Dave the Butcher' recorded at Leeds Instrument Rental. Mastered at Kendun Recorders.
Critical reception: Swordfishtrombones was received as a landmark event. CMJ called it 'nothing short of a modern American masterpiece.' Billboard described it as Waits' 'most varied, eclectic album yet.' NME ranked it the second best album of 1983. In retrospective assessments, Spin named it the second greatest album of all time in 1989. Pitchfork ranked it eleventh in its 2002 list of the best albums of the 1980s. Q placed it 36th in its 2006 ranking of the best albums of the 1980s. AllMusic's William Ruhlmann wrote that it 'marked an evolution of which Waits had not seemed capable, and in career terms it reinvented him.' Elvis Costello included it on his list of essential albums. The album is widely considered the first in a loose trilogy completed by Rain Dogs (1985) and Franks Wild Years (1987).
Commercial success: Swordfishtrombones peaked at number 167 on the Billboard 200 — modest for an artist of Waits' standing — but it was not a commercial record and was not conceived as one. Its legacy is artistic rather than chartological. It established Island Records as Waits' label home for the most acclaimed phase of his career, and it reinvented him as a figure capable of continuous evolution, making possible the extended creative partnership that produced Rain Dogs and beyond. It was voted number 374 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000).
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