{"id":397290,"date":"2025-09-04T12:59:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T12:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/397290\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T12:59:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T12:59:12","slug":"how-tom-waits-became-noah-and-thom-yorkes-driving-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/397290\/","title":{"rendered":"How Tom Waits became Noah and Thom Yorke’s driving album"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Noah<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still \/ Raph_PH)<\/p>\n

Thu 4 September 2025 4:00, UK <\/p>\n

Whether it be during family car journeys or shared lifts with friends, the best musical educations take place in the back seat of a car. <\/p>\n

For me, it was yelling along to Foo Fighters\u2019 Wasting Light with my dad at the wheel. For others, like Thom Yorke<\/a>\u2018s son Noah, it was discovering Tom Waits while hitting the road with his parents. <\/p>\n

Speaking to Far Out in 2023, the Radiohead frontman\u2019s son gave us nine of his favourite albums <\/a>of all time, including the creative products of Death Grips and John Frusciante: an eclectic mix to say the least. But it was Tom Waits\u2019 Rain Dogs that was awarded Yorke\u2019s first pick from the 20th century. <\/p>\n

In his own words, the 1985 album was \u201cimpossible not to include\u201d with its mix of western-tinged blues, raspy piano ballads and guitar lines courtesy of Keith Richards. Yet Yorke\u2019s choice of album comes as no surprise; after all, he first heard it in the car. \u201cAll of these songs are imprinted onto my brain from years of listening to them in the car with my parents when I was small, and as I have grown up, they have never left,\u201d Noah admitted, adding, \u201c[Rain Dogs is] a very formative album for me; Waits\u2019 cast of colourful characters pretty much feel like old friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, Noah appears to have inherited his dad\u2019s music taste, just as he has his musical talent. Speaking to The Guardian<\/a> in 2023, the elder Yorke professed his love for Waits. \u201cI think I was 17 when\u00a0Rain Dogs\u00a0came out,\u201d he said, \u201cI bought the cassette and gazed at the weird guy held by his mother [on the cover] wondering what the fuck that was about. That cassette had a magic I couldn\u2019t figure out\u2026and I got more and more sucked in; it crept deep into my subconscious\u201d.<\/p>\n

He elaborated on how enmeshed he became with the record, sleeping to it playing on his Walkman and waking up to it \u201cstill on autorepeat\u201d. The balladic nature of the tracks painted a very vivid picture for young Thom, where he imagined \u201cevery track was a short movie set in a mysterious, circus-like down-at-heel America that I had almost no understanding of, with different characters both in the lyrics and the instruments, an entire universe revealed to me for a few minutes only to drop me at the other end of the block, no idea how I\u2019d got there\u201d. <\/p>\n

According to Yorke, \u201cevery lyric\u201d on the album is an \u201ceffortless rhyme\u201d, a piece of poetry worthy of another artist\u2019s envy. <\/p>\n

He concluded, highlighting the remastered version\u2019s efficacy, stating, \u201cThis record has never got tired for me, though I have played it over and over throughout my life, as did my kids growing up. This new mastering has brought all those feelings back to me, back to now, as if it had just been released.\u201d<\/p>\n

Waits\u2019 ninth studio album, released via Island Records, serves as a departure from his earlier, gentler sound found on 1973\u2019s Closing Time<\/a>, featuring crooners like \u2018I Hope That I Don\u2019t Fall in Love With You\u2019 and \u2018Martha\u2019. Not only was the album his first collaboration with the guitarist Marc Ribot, but it also marked the musician\u2019s first recording with The Rolling Stones\u2019 Keith Richards, who plays on \u2018Big Black Mariah\u2019, \u2018Union Square\u2019 and \u2018Blind Love\u2019. <\/p>\n

For music fanatics far and wide,\u00a0Rain Dogs\u00a0is known as the second instalment in the artist\u2019s mid-career trilogy, succeeded by\u00a0Swordfishtrombones\u00a0and\u00a0Frank\u2019s Wild Years, respectively. Renowned for its melange of musical genres and styles, the album is an elegy to the setting in which it was written, gleaned from the sounds and people that make up the impoverished borough. <\/p>\n

Lyrically, the album focuses on the \u201curban dispossessed\u201d of New York, given it was written by Waits in a dusty Manhattan basement. Despite having peaked at 29 in the UK charts, Rain Dogs had gone down in musical history as a cacophony of street sounds, accordion segments and a Beatnik vision that never dies. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still \/ Raph_PH) Thu 4 September 2025 4:00, UK Whether it be during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397291,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[77,269,137171,4161,4005,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-397290","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-noah-yorke","11":"tag-radiohead","12":"tag-thom-yorke","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115146153531080420","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}