Description: "Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits's career, when he lived, wrote and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles; from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time (1973), to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones (1983). Starting his song-writing career in the '70s, Waits absorbed LA's wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city's literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. Mixing the domestic with the mythic, Waits turned quotidian, autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic; a vision of LA as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations."--Provided by publisher.
Brief description: Alex Harvey is a producer and director of programs including Panorama and The Late Show for the BBC. His films include The Lives of Animals and Enter the Jungle. Based in Los Angeles, he regularly writes on literature, film, and music for the London Review of Books and Los Angeles Review of Books.
Review Quotes: "Harvey has done a fine, impassioned job of piecing together the bricolage from which this most elusive, self-mythologizing figure set about assembling that "down-and-out but amusing [...] character" who happened to write some of the most interesting songs of his era, but who in the end had to be burned away by the man behind the mask, for whom restlessness, self-invention, and an open road had always been at the heart of it all."-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"