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This distance fills up with Tom’s songs of longing and regret. 3 Movement and space play a literal role in the design and construction of Waits’s songs; even his densest songs maintain a sense of space where the Music, Instrumentation, and Voice 17 performer and audience can breathe and the imagination is allowed to create meaning from not only what is heard but also from what is not there. Tom Waits’s music from Swordfishtrombones on defies the norm in terms of production values, song structure, instrumentation, and vocal timbre, as far as the glossy, highly produced, three-minute, verse-chorus-verse-chorus, pop-rock radio standards go and is often ignored by all but college radio stations.

19 Either way, it depicts the clatter and clank of a perplexing world beneath your feet. “Shore Leave” is musically very simple but abounds in textures, tone colors, and mysterious musical effects, such as the screech of a metal chair on a cement floor, that tell an aural story of a lonely marine on shore leave and complement Waits’s guttural lament. The low rumble of a muted trombone gives the impression of cars passing by on a desolate, wet street, the rice in the bass drum creates sounds of waves and rain, metal aunglongs imitate the sounds of metal wind chimes or tin cans rattling in the breeze, and the wooden marimbas add a subtle element of exoticism.

I thought I had to find a way to bring it closer. 11 As “one thinks of identity whenever one is not sure of where one belongs,”12 Waits submerged himself in a drunk character and a jazz idiom, however, as he grew musically and as a lyricist, he became more and more comfortable with uncertainty, asserting many different personas and delving into very disparate musical styles and genres. As he dismantled the image he had worked hard to establish, he learned to “approach each song like a character in a little one-act play.