Interview: Tom Waits

Interview by Amanda Petrusich | Photo by Danny Clinch

Tom Waits' latest endeavor, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, is a three-disc compendium of 30 new tracks and a mess of hard-to-find soundtrack pieces, all organized into three categories that manage to accurately encapsulate more than three decades of brutal noisemaking. Like most of America, I'm so convinced that Tom Waits exists in a world populated only by freight trains and barmaids, rodeo clowns and shortwave radios, that to hear him say "Chamillionaire" is about as jarring as a car crash: Here, Waits opens up about his songwriting, Scarlett Johannson, and his own glorious artifice.

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