TOM WAITS

In a career that has spanned four decades, his music has taken adventurous turns, from confessional country-blues and jazz-flavored lounge, to primal rock and avant-garde musical theatre. By turns tender and poignant, to strange and twisted, his songs tend to explore the dark, underbelly of society as he gives his uniquely human voice to adventurers both romantic and mercenary, drifters, con artists and those forgotten characters on the fringe and in the fray. He has expanded and drawn from a deep well of American song idioms: folk, blues, country, jazz ballads, polkas, cabaret, swing, popular ballads, and a category that can only be described as "Waitsian."