Rain Dogs

Tom Waits wrote most of Rain Dogs, all nineteen tracks of it, during a concentrated stretch in the fall of 1984, working out of a rented basement space near Washington and Horatio Streets in Manhattan's West Village^[1]. New York itself became raw material for the record, and Waits has described treating the city's own vocabulary, storefronts, tailors, hardware stores, as source text for lyrics, and bringing ambient street noise directly into the sessions rather than leaning on the synthesizers and digital samplers common in mid-1980s pop production^[1].

That preference for texture over polish shaped the whole album. Waits favored physically generated, tactile sounds, famously preferring to hit a door with a length of wood over reaching for a drum machine^[1], and the finished record plays as a loose concept album about New York's outsiders and drifters, its eclectic instrumentation (marimba, accordion, trombone, banjo) merging the socialist cabaret of Kurt Weill, old dirty blues, and the elegiac melancholy of New Orleans funeral brass into something singularly Waits's own^[1]. The cast of characters populating it, one-armed dwarfs, men tumbling out of windows in confetti, tramps and hustlers, cemented Waits's reputation as a chronicler of urban grotesques^[2].

Contemporary critics recognized it immediately: Robert Palmer of The New York Times called it that year's most dazzling and protean pop album^[1], and it has since been ranked 21st on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 best albums of the 1980s and eighth on Pitchfork's equivalent list^[1]. It sits as the middle installment of an unofficial trilogy alongside Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years, the run of records that established Waits, with his wife and collaborator Kathleen Brennan, as an artist willing to abandon commercial convention entirely^[1].

Amid that carnival of grotesques, the album's closest brush with a conventional pop song, "Downtown Train", became an unlikely commercial afterlife of its own: largely overlooked in Waits's own version, it turned into a massive hit for Rod Stewart four years later^[2].