Lowside Of The Road
A Life of Tom Waits

An extremely unauthorized bio of Tom Waits, this book leads us from Waits' beginnings at the Troubador up until the Glitter and Doom tour this past year. Honestly, I mostly never really want to know the person behind my favorite music and Waits has become one of my top favorites. I don't know, I gues......more

Lowside of the Road is an unauthorized biography of Tom Waits by Barney Hoskyns, published in 2009. I'm going to come clean and say upfront that I haven't read many biographies I really loved and I don't read that many biographies period. I really liked the Patty Smith book, Just Kids, and although......more

I haven't spent much time with biographies, so I wanted to pick an interesting one. And I did. Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits. If you're not familiar with the artist and actor, he's had an interesting life, and even though this wasn't an "authorized" biography, Barney Hoskyns does a decent......more

For music to mean anything to me it has to reach me on an emotional level and few singer-songwriters have managed to do that. I rarely use the word genius to describe a musician and my list is a short one; Lennon/McCartney, Dylan, Roger Waters, Johnny Cash, and the least recognized and subject of th......more

When I was a student in apartheid era South Africa, in the 1980s, it was hard to come by information about what was happening just over the hill. To find out personal details of completely obscure (to South Africans) musicians like Waits or Cohen was near impossible. No media here carried stories on......more