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Tom Waits contains multitudes. That statement will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever laid down small change for one of his records or caught one of his enigmatic late-night appearances. He’s spent a cup of coffee as a San Diego folkie, moonlit as an inebriated lounge act and scrapped and salvaged as a beatboxing junkman. He’s served as a cinematic muse to auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola, Terry Gilliam and Jim Jarmusch; perched as a songbird in the ear of everyone from Bette Midler and Rod Stewart to Tori Amos and Scarlett Johansson. There was also a sea shanty with Keith Richards in there somewhere, for those keeping score at home. It’s not the typical rap sheet for the son of middle-class school teachers from a small burg outside of Los Angeles.

Perhaps, most surprising then is that Waits’ eclectic career somehow seems to make sense when looking back across the scope of five-plus decades in the music business. His evolution has been less a series of seismic shifts or sea changes between albums (and personas) and more akin to a subtle set of permutations of what came prior—mixed with elements of where the artist had set his sights next. Consequently, Tom Waits never sounds quite the same way twice—and yet, he always still registers unmistakably as Tom Waits. And it would be just that simple if not for 1983’s Swordfishtrombones, the punctuating, head-scratching, nightmarish outlier of a record that turned everything listeners thought they knew about Tom Waits the artist on its confetti-covered head. Now, 40 years later, Swordfishtrombones boldly hangs mounted within Waits’ discography as the departure point for his transformation into the experimental tunesmith and avant-garde performer fans recognize and revere today…