100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Singapore

02 Clap Hands

03 Cemetery Polka

04 Jockey Full of Bourbon

05 Tango Till They’re Sore

06 Big Black Mariah

07 Diamonds & Gold

08 Hang Down Your Head

09 Time

10 Rain Dogs

11 Midtown

12 9th & Hennepin

13 Gun Street Girl

14 Union Square

15 Blind Love

16 Walking Spanish

17 Downtown Train

18 Bride of Rain Dog

19 Anywhere I Lay My Head

Rain Dogs begins with Tom Waits shipping out on ‘Singapore’: ‘We sail tonight for Singapore,’ the singersongwriter gruffly declares, somehow sounding delighted and a touch demented at the same time. But by the album’s final track he’s ready to settle down on ‘Anywhere I Lay My Head’. This album, the ninth from an artist already judged one of the most distinctive in popular music, is about going there and coming back, in every sense of the phrase.

Waits was one of those eccentric Californian kids, the kind that reflect the state’s open space and comparatively brief history by remaking themselves as they see fit. Having got through the 1960s and a stint in the US Coast Guard, he made his name in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. However, from the start commercial success came at a remove. His most successful compositions were covers performed by the likes of Tim Buckley and the Eagles. With each album he refined his sound and found a deeper fascination with the odd corners of American life, whether it was strange jazz tendrils and pimps, or vaudeville and saloon houses.

Rain Dogs took him to New York, and much of the album was penned during a few months in 1984 in a basement room in lower Manhattan. ‘It was a good place for me to work. Very quiet, except for the water coming through the pipes every now and then. Sort of like being in a vault,’ Waits would later recall, although the songs saw markedly different visions of the city take flight. ‘All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes,’ Waits declared on ‘9th & Hennepin’, a semi-spoken ode to an old diner where he sounds like a detective from a noir novel who’s forgotten what his assignment is.

The album built on the foundation of 1983’s acclaimed Swordfishtrombones, putting aside any vestiges of his lounge lizard act from the 1970s for something leaner and far more compelling. With Marc Ribot as his guitarist – who soon discovered that Waits preferred his backing band not to know, let alone rehearse, the song they were about to record – Waits could turn from the voodoo boogie of ‘Union Square’ to the twisted ragtime lament ‘Tango Till They’re Sore’. The tracks had eccentric grooves and oddball percussion, and it sounded like they were grounded in the strange undercurrents of the American metropolis.

Keith Richards played on a handful of tracks, adding wiry licks to the primal R&B groove of ‘Big Black Mariah’ among others, but the most notable contributor barely made the credits. Kathleen Brennan was credited as the co-writer on ‘Hang Down Your Head’, but the screenwriter, who he married in August 1980 and dedicated Rain Dogs to, was credited by Waits with shifting his focus. With Rain Dogs Waits could jump from style to style, but the record was tied together by his iconic voice and the sad beauty of the city’s lost denizens. ‘The only kind of love is stone blind love,’ he notes on ‘Blind Love’, and that sense of acceptance for better or worse sums up the world of Rain Dogs, where the many protagonists on these 19 songs stake out their seats at the bar without a hint of judgment from their creator. At the height of rock’s slick studio age, Tom Waits turned the history books upside down and shook free the minor accomplices no-one ever paid that much attention to. Rain Dogs is an idiosyncratic masterpiece.