Tom Waits - Nighthawks at the Diner

Remastered and reissued on Anti. For his third album, Nighthawks at the Diner, Tom Waits set up a nightclub in the studio, invited an audience, and cut a 70-minute, two-LP set of new songs. It's an appropriate format for compositions that deal even more graphically and, for the first time, humorously with Waits' late-night world of bars and diners.

The love lyrics of his debut album had long since given way to a comic lonely-guy stance glimpsed in Emotional Weather Report and Better Off Without a Wife. But what really matters is the elaborate scene-setting of songs like the six-and-a-half-minute Spare Parts, the seven-and-a-half-minute Putnam County, and especially the 11-and-a-half-minute Nighthawk Postcards that are essentially poetry recitations with jazz backing.

Waits is a colourful tour guide of midnight L.A., raving over a swinging rhythm section of Jim Hughart (bass) and Bill Goodwin (drums), with Pete Christlieb wailing away on tenor sax between paragraphs and Mike Melvoin trading off with Waits on piano runs.