Waits: 'I'm embarrassed by early songs'

Tom Waits has said that he is embarrassed by many of his earliest songs.

The singer-songwriter told The Guardian that he was still finding his way in the music industry with his albums prior to 1983's Swordfishtrombones.

Waits said: "I'm embarrassed by them. It was a time when I was trying to find my place within the business. I was figuring out who I was and where that person intersected with the world of commerce.

"It was like I was sitting there with a ventriloquist's dummy on my knee. And the dummy is made out of wood. And after a while you start to hate each other."

Of his relationship with wife Kathleen Brennan, who he met in 1980, he added: "She rescued me. Maybe I rescued her too; that's often how it works. Upshot is that we both got into the same leaky boat.

"Maybe the weight drags it down, because now you've two people sitting in it. Sorry, baby! But on the other hand you've also got two people's imagination to patch it up again.

"Everybody knows she's the brains behind Pa, as Dylan might have said. I'm just the figurehead. She's the one who's steering the ship."