At 76, Tom Waits Finally Reveals His 8 Favorite Songs of all Time JJ

He has always insisted the list would change tomorrow, and that instability is the whole point. Tom Waits doesn’t collect favorites like trophies. He collects them like weather. These are [music] eight songs he’s named across the years as ones that shaped him. The 42 words fits [music] the intro range. Ready to move to section eight whenever you say the word. Eight.

Ode to Billie Joe. Some songs are famous for what they refuse to explain. Bobby Gentry’s 1967 hit never says what Billie Joe McAllister threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge, never says why he jumped, [music] lets an entire Mississippi family keep passing the biscuits while a boy’s death sits unspoken at the table. [music] That silence is the song.

>> Today Billie [singing] Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. >> Gentry understood that the gap says more [music] than the confession would. Waits has spent his own career working that same gap, writing characters who withhold as much as they reveal, letting a detail stand in for a whole ruined life.

A wallet photograph, a jukebox in a bar nobody names, a woman writing a Christmas card from a place she won’t describe directly. Gentry’s fingerprints are all over that instinct, whether Waits ever said so outright or not. Gentry wrote and produced the track herself at a time when few women in Nashville got that kind of creative control, arranging the strings to hang back like fog rather than swell like Hollywood.

The production stays out of the story’s way, [music] letting the family’s small talk carry the horror underneath it. That restraint is its own kind of authorship, the same restraint Waits practices whenever he lets silence do the work a lyric could have done instead. Far Out’s compilation of the songs Waits has named as favorites over the years places Ode to Billie Joe >> [music] >> among tracks carrying an atmosphere of mysterious intrigue that mirrors the sense of enigma Waits has sought in his own writing.

>> Some conditions, some situations seem to need a song for it. >> It’s a fitting entry point into a list built less on hits than on haunted [music] corners of American songwriting, corners Waits has been quietly furnishing his entire career. Seven, Soldier Boy. 1962 put a girl group at the top of the charts singing to a man in uniform, and Soldier Boy turned that devotion into something closer to a vow than a love song.

The Shirelles had already broken ground with Will You Love Me Tomorrow, but [music] this one strips the arrangement down further. Just voices and a steady march of a beat promising to wait through whatever comes. That plainness is the whole trick. No metaphor stands between the singer and the promise she’s making. >> [music] [singing] >> The Shirelles let the melody carry the weight instead of the lyric, and the sincerity lands harder for it, the [music] same way a Waits ballad often does when he drops the theatrics and just lets the words sit bare on the

table. The group had already been recording for four years by the time Soldier Boy topped the charts. Teenagers from Passaic, New Jersey, who [music] helped invent an entire vocabulary for girl group harmony before most of their imitators existed. Shirley Owens sang lead with a clarity that never oversold the emotion.

Trusting the melody to do the persuading. That trust in simplicity is a discipline, not an absence of ambition, and it’s a discipline plenty of more celebrated songwriters never master. Waits grew up on exactly this kind of AM radio devotional music, and Far Out’s list of his named favorites confirms the Shirelles among the acts that shaped him, artists representing an unabashedly poppier side of his taste than his own catalog usually suggests.

It’s a reminder that the man who wrote Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis started somewhere much sweeter, listening to a girl group promise a soldier she’d still be there when he came home. Six, Like a Fool. Ike and Tina Turner built their early sound on raw nerve before the review ever got polished into a spectacle.

And Like a Fool catches them in that rougher, hungrier period. >> [music] >> Tina’s voice does something no amount of production can replicate, cracking exactly where the lyric needs it to crack, [music] turning heartbreak into something you feel in your chest before you understand it in your head. That rawness is the connective tissue between Ike [music] and Tina Turner and Tom Waits, an artist who has spent decades chasing the sound of a voice that hasn’t been smoothed over.

Waits has always preferred the crack to the polish, the imperfection that proves a is [music] actually happening rather than being manufactured. Tina Turner never once let a take sound safe. The early ’60s material this song comes from finds the duo still building their reputation on the Chitlin’ Circuit, playing rougher rooms night after night before the horns and the choreography turned them into a nationally known act.

That [music] circuit toughened Tina’s instrument in ways a studio never could, teaching her to project emotion over a live band with [music] no safety net. Waits has spoken often about wanting his own recordings to carry that same unpolished, [music] lived-in danger rather than a studio sheen.

The broader list of songs Waits has named as favorites places Ike and Tina Turner alongside the Shirelles and Roy Orbison as part of the poppier tastes hiding underneath [music] his own gravel and junkyard reputation. It’s an unexpected pairing on paper, the growling bard of Skid Row citing a soul revue at its most electric, but Waits has never trusted easy categories, and Tina Turner’s voice is proof that raw feeling doesn’t require raw material to sound [music] legitimate.

Five, Wang Dang Doodle. Willie Dixon wrote Wang Dang Doodle for Howlin’ Wolf in 1960, and Wolf turned it into something closer to a seance than a song. >> [music] >> A guest list of blues characters gathering for a party that sounds equal [music] parts celebration and warning. The rhythm never lets up. The names pile on top of each other.

Automatic [music] Slim, Razor Totin’ Jim, until the whole track feels like a room getting more crowded and more dangerous by the verse. That kind of populated, >> [music] >> character-stacked storytelling runs directly through Waits’s own songbook. His albums are full of exactly this device. A cast of oddball names doing strange things in a confined space, the music building tension through accumulation rather than melody alone.

Wolf’s gravel-throated delivery on Wang Dang Doodle is practically a blueprint for the vocal texture Waits would spend a career chasing. Wolf initially resisted the song, reportedly finding its party-time lyrics beneath the deeper blues he preferred to sing, and only recorded it at Dixon’s insistence. That reluctance never shows up in the performance.

>> [music] >> Once the tape rolled, Wolf committed completely, growling through the guest list like a man who had personally thrown every one of those parties and lived to describe the wreckage. Koko Taylor’s version would later become the more famous single, [music] but Wolf’s original carries a menace hers never quite reaches.

The list of songs Waits has named as personal favorites groups Howlin’ Wolf among the artists on what’s described as the rock side of his taste, alongside the Kinks and the Pogues. It makes sense. Wolf didn’t just influence blues singers. [music] He influenced anyone looking for a voice that sounded like it had lived through something, and Waits built an entire career on exactly that sound.

Four, >> [music] >> You Really Got Me. Three chords and a fuzzed-out riff changed rock and roll in 1964, and You Really Got Me is where The Kinks did it. Dave Davies [music] famously slashed his amp speaker with a razor blade to get that dirty distorted tone, and the resulting sound became a blueprint for garage rock, punk, and heavy metal alike.

All traceable back to one snarling two-minute [music] single. That willingness to break the equipment on purpose, to want the wrong sound instead of the clean one, is a philosophy Waits has built [music] an entire career around. He has spent decades hunting for the sound of something broken, banging on junkyard percussion, running vocals through distortion, treating imperfection >> [music] >> as the point rather than the flaw.

The Kinks got there first, and got there with a razor blade. >> Oh, yeah. You really got me. >> The band recorded the song twice, scrapping a cleaner first version at their label’s request before Ray Davies insisted on cutting it again with the raw arrangement that actually became the hit.

That instinct to trust the ugly version over the polished one is a small piece of rock and roll history that gets overlooked next to the razor blade story, but it matters just as much. >> [music] >> Sometimes the destruction is the arrangement decision, not just the equipment. Far Out’s list of songs Waits has named as favorites places The Kinks on what it calls the rock side of his taste, next to Janis Joplin and Howlin’ Wolf, evidence of a musician drawn to noise [music] with intention behind it.

You Really Got Me isn’t subtle and was never trying to be. [music] Three, In Dreams. Roy Orbison built In Dreams like nothing else on the radio in 1963. A song with no repeating chorus, structured instead as a slow climb through seven distinct musical movements that keep rising until his voice reaches a falsetto so exposed it barely sounds human.

Producers worried it was too strange for a single. It became one of his signature songs anyway. >> [music] >> That refusal to follow a conventional structure is exactly the kind of songwriting instinct Waits has spent a lifetime respecting. [music] Orbison wasn’t interested in verses and choruses doing what they were supposed to do.

He was interested in where the emotion needed to go next and he built the song’s shape around that [music] instead of around formula. Waits has done the same thing across dozens of records, [music] letting a song’s structure bend to whatever feeling it’s chasing. Orbison reportedly wrote [music] the entire thing in about 20 minutes, half asleep.

The melody arriving almost fully [music] formed before he had time to second-guess its strangeness. That speed is part of what makes the structure feel inevitable rather than engineered, a dream logic instead of a compositional chart. David Lynch would later borrow the song’s unsettling beauty wholesale for Blue Velvet, using it to turn a nightmare sequence into something the audience couldn’t look away [music] from.

Two, I just want to see His Face. By 1969, the Rolling Stones were done trying to sound tidy [music] and I Just Want to See His Face is the sound of a band letting a groove wander wherever it wanted. >> [music] [singing] >> There’s barely a song here in the traditional sense, more a hypnotic gospel-tinged jam built around a repeated vocal fragment [music] and Charlie Watts locking into a beat that never resolves into a chorus.

It shouldn’t work. It works completely. It’s an unusual pick precisely because it resists description. An extended jam with very little conventional form. And that resistance doubles as a fair summary of what Waits himself has done across records like Frank’s Wild Years and Bone Machine. Songs assembled more like structures found in a junkyard than compositions [music] built to formula.

Form has never been the point for either artist. The atmosphere is. The track closes out Let It Bleed, an album already full of the Stones at their darkest and most experimental. [music] And its placement there feels deliberate. A come down after the more [music] conventional songs that preceded. There are no clear verses to sing along to.

Just a treated piano, distorted percussion, and Mick Jagger’s voice buried low in the mix like something half remembered rather than performed. It sounds less like a band finishing a record and more like a band still searching for the ending. Paired with the Beggars Banquet [music] and Let It Bleed era Stones at their loosest, I Just Want to See His Face Reveals Something About What Waits Values Most in Other People’s Music.

Not polish, not hooks, but the courage to let a song stay strange. One. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Bob Dylan recorded Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands in 1966 as the entire fourth side of Blonde on Blonde. An 11-minute portrait so patient and so strange that Nashville session musicians reportedly [music] played cards for hours waiting for him to finish writing it in the studio.

No other song on this list asks for that kind of surrender. It gives back [music] everything it asks for. Waits has been direct about what Dylan means to him, saying that for a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and a saw are to a carpenter. Not an influence, not an inspiration, a tool. >> Ooh.

That’s a different kind of praise than the enthusiasm shown for artists further down this list. It’s the language of someone describing the equipment their entire trade depends on. The song is widely understood to be written for Dylan’s wife, Sara, though he never confirmed that directly, and the ambiguity only [music] deepens the portrait rather than weakening it.

Verse after verse piles up imagery without ever landing on a single clear picture, exactly the technique that would come to define so much of Dylan’s mid-60s writing. Waits absorbed that lesson early, that a character can be built entirely out of accumulated detail [music] rather than direct statement, and never fully let it go.

“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” earns the top spot because it represents the foundation underneath everything else here, the patience, the willingness to let a song take as long as it needs, the trust that a listener [music] will stay if the writing is honest enough. Eight songs, and Tom Waits would probably tell you tomorrow’s list looks nothing like this one.

That’s not a contradiction, it’s the whole philosophy. He has never trusted anything that stopped moving, including his own taste. If you want more of this kind of listening, the kind that traces an artist backward to find what actually built them, subscribe and stay close.