Thomas Alan Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, composer and actor. His distinctive voice was described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding as though "it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car". Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona with his trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock music styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music.
Waits was raised in Whittier, California, and moved to San Diego with his family at the age of 12. Inspired by Bob Dylan and the Beat Generation, as a teenager he began singing on the San Diego folk music scene. Relocating to Los Angeles, he secured work as a songwriter before gaining a recording contract with Asylum Records and producing his first album, Closing Time, in 1973. He has worked as a composer for movies and musicals and has acted in supporting roles in films, including Paradise Alley and Bram Stoker's Dracula. He also starred in Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film Down by Law. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his soundtrack work on One from the Heart...
Real Gone is the 15th studio album by Tom Waits, released October 3, 2004 in Europe, and October 5 in United States on the ANTI- label. The album was supported by the Real Gone Tour, playing sold out locations in North America and Europe in October and November 2004. The album features some of the few political songs Waits has written, the most explicit being "Day After Tomorrow", a song Waits has described as an "elliptical" protest against the Iraq War. It was chosen by the editors of Harp Magazine as the best album of 2004.
