(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still / Raph_PH)
Thu 4 September 2025 4:00, UK
Whether it be during family car journeys or shared lifts with friends, the best musical educations take place in the back seat of a car.
For me, it was yelling along to Foo Fighters’ Wasting Light with my dad at the wheel. For others, like Thom Yorke‘s son Noah, it was discovering Tom Waits while hitting the road with his parents.
Speaking to Far Out in 2023, the Radiohead frontman’s son gave us nine of his favourite albums of all time, including the creative products of Death Grips and John Frusciante: an eclectic mix to say the least. But it was Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs that was awarded Yorke’s first pick from the 20th century.
In his own words, the 1985 album was “impossible not to include” with its mix of western-tinged blues, raspy piano ballads and guitar lines courtesy of Keith Richards. Yet Yorke’s choice of album comes as no surprise; after all, he first heard it in the car. “All of these songs are imprinted onto my brain from years of listening to them in the car with my parents when I was small, and as I have grown up, they have never left,” Noah admitted, adding, “[Rain Dogs is] a very formative album for me; Waits’ cast of colourful characters pretty much feel like old friends.”
In short, Noah appears to have inherited his dad’s music taste, just as he has his musical talent. Speaking to The Guardian in 2023, the elder Yorke professed his love for Waits. “I think I was 17 when Rain Dogs came out,” he said, “I bought the cassette and gazed at the weird guy held by his mother [on the cover] wondering what the fuck that was about. That cassette had a magic I couldn’t figure out…and I got more and more sucked in; it crept deep into my subconscious”.
He elaborated on how enmeshed he became with the record, sleeping to it playing on his Walkman and waking up to it “still on autorepeat”. The balladic nature of the tracks painted a very vivid picture for young Thom, where he imagined “every track was a short movie set in a mysterious, circus-like down-at-heel America that I had almost no understanding of, with different characters both in the lyrics and the instruments, an entire universe revealed to me for a few minutes only to drop me at the other end of the block, no idea how I’d got there”.
According to Yorke, “every lyric” on the album is an “effortless rhyme”, a piece of poetry worthy of another artist’s envy.
He concluded, highlighting the remastered version’s efficacy, stating, “This record has never got tired for me, though I have played it over and over throughout my life, as did my kids growing up. This new mastering has brought all those feelings back to me, back to now, as if it had just been released.”
Waits’ ninth studio album, released via Island Records, serves as a departure from his earlier, gentler sound found on 1973’s Closing Time, featuring crooners like ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You’ and ‘Martha’. Not only was the album his first collaboration with the guitarist Marc Ribot, but it also marked the musician’s first recording with The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, who plays on ‘Big Black Mariah’, ‘Union Square’ and ‘Blind Love’.
For music fanatics far and wide, Rain Dogs is known as the second instalment in the artist’s mid-career trilogy, succeeded by Swordfishtrombones and Frank’s Wild Years, respectively. Renowned for its melange of musical genres and styles, the album is an elegy to the setting in which it was written, gleaned from the sounds and people that make up the impoverished borough.
Lyrically, the album focuses on the “urban dispossessed” of New York, given it was written by Waits in a dusty Manhattan basement. Despite having peaked at 29 in the UK charts, Rain Dogs had gone down in musical history as a cacophony of street sounds, accordion segments and a Beatnik vision that never dies.
Related Topics