VOGUE

"Remember me...?" Slumped on a park bench, at the bottom of the social heap, the drunken derelict turns his eyes to the heavens as the first flakes of snow begin to fall. "Remember me? I ordered the blonde, the Firebird... Somebody's made a terrible mistake." Nobody loves, or understands, a loser quite as much as Tom Waits. In the last twelve years, he has built up a unique body of work. His songs catalogue the ill starred dreams and fleeting consolations of life in that part of town dissected by the bus station, the bloodbank and the tattoo parlour, describing his gallery of pimps, drunks and small town girls ensnared by vice in a voice bruised by nicotine and alcohol and a musical style ranging from lounge jazz to vaudevillian polka. Now America's most original storyteller, once described by Francis Ford Coppola as "the prince of melancholy", he has turned his attention to the stage. Frank's Wild Years, a theatrical production based on a bar-stool soliloquy from Waits' 1983 album Swordfishtrombones, has already played in Chicago under the aegis of the celebrated Steppenwolf Theater Company, and plans are afoot to bring it to London later this year. In the meantime a soundtrack album is released this month.

Described by Waits as "a cross between Jacqueline Suzanne's Love Machine and the Bible", Frank's Wild Years proceeds from the nowy park bench to juggle the improbable elements of a failed and despondent accordion player, the "used piece of jet trash" that is his wife, and a chihuahua called Carlos into a poignant parable of broken dreams and personal revenge.

For ages a closely guarded secret - a musician whose records gave the appearance less of being released, than of having escaped - Waits' singular career has blossomed in the last three years. Not only has he added commercial success to long-standing critical acclaim with his last two albums, Swordfishtrombones and 1985's Raindogs. He has also side-stepped deftly into movies, providing an Oscar-nominated score - melancholia, in excelsis - for Coppola's One from the Heart, and carrying his repertoire of mumbles and mannerisms onto film in Rumblefish, The Cotton Club and most recently Down By Law, in which Waits plays a disc-jockey behind bars in a New Orleans jail. Jarmusch's film is achingly referential in its evocation of film noir and the hipster's out-of-it cool; Waits' criterion for this, as for any project, is simply that they "let Waits be Waits."

The inference that he is a character role in himself is not misplaced. Born thirty-six years ago, as his own legend has it, "in the back of a yellow cab in Murphy Hospital parking lot, at a very young age", Waits' propensity for self-mythology - his rumpled demeanour, thrift-shop suits and cockroach-impaler shoes - has sometimes threatened to obscure the grist of his craft.

Some have read Waits' world-weary barfly persona as simply the schtick of another tiresome drunk. More profoundly, Waits has trafficked in a particularly American kind of sadness, using his vignettes as platforms for wry and truthful observations about the cavity of desperation and disillusionment beneath the bravura of American life, where visions of happiness and redemption are subservient to the prosaic reality of simply making do. In his faithful and penetrating dissection of the "small change" of American working-class life, Waits has achieved in popular music what Raymond Carver has captured in the medium of the short story.

If there was once the strong suggestion that Waits was living out his own mythology too faithfully - a life of self-elected squalor almost killed him - he has now artfully distanced himself from the persona, emerging as an artist fully in control of his creation.