LONDON , England ( CNN ) -- As the lights went down in the theater the low murmur built to a thunderous ovation as the odd-looking man in the crumpled suit and bowler hat took to the stage . Tom Waits in Paris on the European leg of his tour . The excitement that greeted the eccentric American singer songwriter Tom Waits ' appearance in Edinburgh last month may come as a surprise to the many , who have never heard of him . The 58-year-old has stayed for most of his four-decade career on the edge of the music mainstream . This is despite a showering of critical acclaim and a host of high-profile fans including the movie star Scarlett Johansson , who recently recorded an album of Waits covers . Waits ' position on the periphery of pop music ( he admits that the 60s scene largely passed him by ) , may be because he belongs to a bigger historical tradition -- that of the singer-storyteller that has its origin in folk music . His music comes from a different place from most artists . A laconic , bar room philosopher with a wry sense of humor , Waits is an avowed fan of the Beat generation writer Jack Kerouac and the author and poet Charles Bukowski . Many of his songs are stories containing a cast of characters from America 's underbelly : the drunks and disenfranchised , the lost souls hiding out from life in seedy night spots . It is the same world that Kerouac chronicled in his writings , including his most famous work `` On the Road , '' which describes a journey across America in the late fifties . Waits , who is notoriously interview-shy , acknowledged his debt to the author in a promotional interview to accompany the release of his 1974 album `` The Heart of Saturday Night . '' He said the record was a search for the `` center of Saturday night , '' a quest he said that Kerouac himself had `` relentlessly chased from one end of this country to the other , and I 've attempted to scoop up a few diamonds of this magic that I see . '' Waits ' place in the folk tradition is something he has acknowledged , consciously or otherwise , in his music . In 1990 , he wrote the music and lyrics for `` The Black Rider : The Casting of the Magic Bullets , '' a theatrical collaboration with the American writer William Burroughs based on a German folktale . Like all great writers , Waits is a conscientious observer of people and their strange foibles . Born in Pomona , CA . he moved to Los Angeles in the late sixties to pursue his music career , finding work as a doorman at an LA nightspot . It was at this time that he honed his skills as a storyteller , eavesdropping on the lives of others . `` I was picking up people 's conversations in all-night coffee shops - ambulance drivers , cabdrivers , street sweepers , '' he said in an interview with The New Yorker . `` I did research there as an evening curator , and I started writing gingerly . I thought at some point I 'd like to forge it all into something meaningful , and give it dignity . '' The results of this labor are songs like `` Frank 's Wild Years , '' a hilarious and sinister tale of a man -- Frank -- trapped in suburbia with a wife and pet dog that has a skin disease . The song is spoken in a lounge room style over a soft jazz accompaniment , and like much of Waits ' work it drips irony : `` They had a thoroughly modern kitchen/ Self-cleaning oven ( the whole bit ) / Frank drove a little sedan/ They were so happy . '' In a 1983 promotional interview published by his then record company Island , Waits credits a short story by Bukowski with giving him some of the inspiration for the song . `` Bukowski had a story that essentially was saying that it 's the little things that drive men mad , '' Waits said . `` It 's not World War II . It 's the broken shoe lace when there is no time left that sends men completely out of their minds . `` I think there is a little bit of Frank in everybody . '' In the song , Frank eventually runs amok , setting fire to the family home and blazing a trail up the Hollywood freeway because , as Waits quips in the pay-off `` he never could stand that dog . '' This taste for the absurd carried into his recent live show with the set for the `` Glitter and Doom '' tour decked in a bizarre array of old speaker cones . Waits took to the stage dressed in a Chaplinesque suit , delivering his set from a slightly raised platform that gave up a cloud of dust each time he bashed his feet into it . In spite of the entreaties from the crowd he kept quiet between songs at first . Eventually after a few numbers he broke his silence . `` This is a lopsided love song , '' he rasped , introducing the next track . `` By that I mean the person doing it is lopsided , not the song itself . '' Lopsided or not , it 's an authentic voice we could surely do with hearing more from .
Singer songwriter Tom Waits has won critical acclaim for his music . His strange tales of the seedy side of America have attracted a cult following . The singer is best known as one half of the duo with fellow musician and producer Jack White. Waits counts U.S. writers Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski as influences .