Spanning Tom Waits' extraordinary 40-year career, from Closing Time to Orphans, Lowside of the Road is Barney Hoskyns' unique take on one of rock's great enigmas. Like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Waits is a chameleonic survivor who's achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. From his perilous jazzbo years in '70s Los Angeles to the multiple-Grammy winner of recent years — by way of such shape-shifting '80s albums as Swordfish trombones — this exhaustive biography charts Waits' life step-by-step and album-by-album. Affectionate and penetrating, and based on a combination of assiduous research and deep critical insight, this is an outstanding investigation of a notoriously private artist and performer — the definitive account to date of Tom Waits' life and work.