Heartattack and Vine

Waits called the record transitional. In a 1983 interview with Record Magazine he said it was an attempt to avoid using a knife and a fork and a spoon. He called the title track a breakthrough because of its fuzz guitar and a drummer who played with sticks instead of brushes.

It reached number 96 in the US in 1981 and number 31 in Australia. Stephen Holden gave it four stars in Rolling Stone and wrote that Waits finds more beauty in the gutter than most people would find in the Garden of Eden. Uncut gave it 5 out of 5, Q 4 out of 5, and Pitchfork 8.5 out of 10.

The songs lived on in other places. On the Nickel was recorded for Ralph Waite's 1980 film of that name and became the theme of the 1985 miniseries The Atlanta Child Murders. Jean-Luc Godard used Ruby's Arms in First Name: Carmen in 1983, and Kazuo Ishiguro said it influenced The Remains of the Day.

Waits still owed the label an album, so he took a break from the One from the Heart soundtrack, wrote this one under the working title White Spades and recorded it in June 1980. Hoskyns called it one of Waits's pinnacle achievements. Deusner reads it less as a transition than as a goodbye to the barroom world: In Shades is a smooth organ-led instrumental full of nightclub chatter and silverware clatter, and the closing Ruby's Arms is one of his tenderest songs. Jerry Yester arranged and conducted the orchestra on Jersey Girl and Ruby's Arms, and Bob Alcivar did the same on Saving All My Love for You and On the Nickel.