Tom Waits

Year:
2011
Inducted by:
Neil Young (Buffalo Springfield)
Category:
Performers

Introduction

The free spirit who watched from the fringes.

Tom Waits is a kind of modern troubadour, putting his husky, rasping voice to use singing his lyrical love letters to the outsiders, the drifters and the nonconformists.

Neil Young Inducts Tom Waits

Neil Young Inducts Tom Waits at the 2011 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony

Neil Young Inducts Tom Waits

00:02:58
Tom Waits Acceptance Speech

00:05:49
"Rain Dogs"

00:04:08

Hall of Fame Essay

2011

Rob Bowman

As is the case with a select few genre-defining artists such as Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell,Tom Waits, over the course of his nearly forty-year career, has operated under the maxim “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

Refusing to stay still and rest on his laurels, Waits has continuously sought new influences, dramatically reinventing himself and his art along the way. In the process, he has forged a highly original, personal, and idiosyncratic musical lexicon, resulting in one of the most distinctive, rich, and diverse bodies of recorded work in American popular music history.