Tom Waits

In retrospect, it seems like Tom Waits has been on a one-man mission to shatter singer/songwriter clichés since the start of his career in the early ‘70s. His initial persona, after all, was that of a boozing, bebop-schooled street poet who had more in common with Charles Bukowski than with contemporaries like Jackson Browne. That template saw Waits through most of the ‘70s, and produced some of the most indelible ballads of the era: screw Billy Joel, Waits was the real "piano man" of the Jerry Ford years. He started toying with a tougher, more blues-based sound on 1980's Heartattack and Vine, but it was three years later that he really rewrote the rulebook with Swordfishtrombones. One of the most unprecedented, idiosyncratic, and influential albums of the ‘80s, it poured the past into a musical meat grinder, with bits of Kurt Weill, Captain Beefheart, Howlin' Wolf, Harry Partch and more creating a brash, angular new approach that Waits would continue exploring and refining for decades. Somewhere along the way, he even managed to maintain a successful sideline as a film actor. Widely regarded as a national treasure, Waits continues to amass a strikingly original body of work.