Rain Dogs

Waits wrote most of the album over about two months in the fall of 1984 in a basement room at Washington and Horatio Streets in Manhattan, after recording street sounds on cassette. Barney Hoskyns links its theme of the urban dispossessed partly to Martin Bell's 1984 documentary Streetwise, which Waits scored in part. Anders Petersen took the cover photograph at Cafe Lehmitz in Hamburg. It was recorded at RCA 6th Ave, with Robert Musso engineering and mixing.

It reached number 29 in the UK, 5 in Sweden and 12 in Norway, and went Gold in the US, the UK and Canada. Robert Palmer of the New York Times called it the year's best and its most dazzling and protean pop album. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson gave it 10 out of 10, and Rolling Stone ranked it 357th on its 2020 list of 500 albums. Thom Yorke said every track was a short movie. Ernest Simpson, reviewing it for Treble in 2004, called it the quintessential Tom Waits album.

The title refers to the rough sleepers of the city, and Waits described the sound as an interaction between Appalachia and Nigeria. The sessions were at the old RCA Studios, where Ribot said the band set up in a clump in the middle of a large room. Michael Blair confirmed that the opening beat of Singapore is him hitting an old dresser with a real hammer. Ribot had been invited after Waits joined the Lounge Lizards on stage on New Year's Eve 1984. He said there were no written charts: Waits would play guitar, piano or congas, set a rhythm and a vibe, and the musicians came up with parts.

Richardson of Pitchfork notes that the drum setup used few or no cymbals and a 32-inch bass drum, that Hal Willner had given Waits an education in Kurt Weill, and that Waits asked Richards to play and he agreed. The New York Times named it the best album of 1985, NME named it album of the year, and Rolling Stone made Waits its Songwriter of the Year.