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In the work of American songwriter Tom Waits, swampy blues, Beat poetry, West Coast jazz, Tin Pan Alley, country, 1930s-era cabaret, and post-Civil War parlor songs meet neon-lit carnival music and wheezing, clattering, experimental rhythms (often played by makeshift musical instruments), forming a keenly individual musical universe. It has often been imitated but never replicated. Since the '70s, Waits has charted a path from playing fleabag dive bars to opera theaters and prestigious concert halls all over the world. His recordings - from early masterpieces such as Small Change and Blue Valentine and the twisted, dramatic, and black, humorous art songs on the trilogy of Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Frank's Wild Years, to the deconstructed experimental soundworlds erected for Bone Machine and Mule Variations - have charted the lives and circumstances of the humble, forgotten, evil, demented, abandoned, cursed, and just plain down-on-their-luck humans to places of honor in our pantheon in a spirit akin to the photographs of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. Waits has won two Grammys and is a member of the 2011 class of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is included among the 2010 list of Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Singers, as well as its 2015 list of 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.

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