Tom Waits by Matt Mahurin

Tom Waits has been making music since the early 1970s — music that draws on American roots traditions (blues, jazz, folk, Tin Pan Alley) while remaining completely unlike anything else in the culture: gravelly, cinematic, tender, grotesque, funny, devastating. Matt Mahurin photographed Waits over several decades, developing a visual language as distinctive as Waits’s own — and this Abrams volume gathers that photographic work alongside Waits’s own words, creating a portrait of one of American music’s most singular figures that is as much art object as documentary record.

Essential for Waits devotees — and a beautifully produced celebration of one of America’s great originals. Published by Abrams.