Kathleen Patricia Brennan (born 1955) is an Irish-American musician, songwriter, record producer, and artist. She is known for her work as a co-writer, producer, and influence on the work of her husband Tom Waits.
Waits dedicated his 1980 song "Jersey Girl" to Brennan,[6] and they were married later that year[2] in the Always Forever Wedding Chapel.[7] After they married, Brennan encouraged Waits to become his own producer.[8]
Waits has described Brennan as "a remarkable collaborator.... She's bold, inventive and fearless. That's who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you."[18] Waits has also said: "She doesn't like the limelight, but she's an incandescent presence on all songs we work on together."[19] In 2008, Waits described their collaboration as "one person holds the nail and the other one swings the hammer".[20] In 2020, Brennan described Waits' songs as either "grim reapers" or "grand weepers".[21]
In 2023, Waits and Brennan oversaw reissues of remastered versions of Swordfishtrombones, RainDogs, Frank'sWildYears, BoneMachine, and The Black Rider.[22] The remasters used original master tapes[23] and were marketed as "The Island Years", because they were originally released on Island Records.[24]
Honors and awards
In 2015, Brennan and Waits were honored as part of the This Is Dedicated: Music's Greatest Marriages show by Jarrod Spector and Kelli Barrett.[25]
In 2016, Brennan was honored, along with Waits and John Prine, at The Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Awards from PEN New England.[26][27] The event was hosted by the JFK Library; during the event Colum McCann honored the creative partnership of Brennan and Waits, stating, "The world as we have it is their lucky anthem. They fling it open with their lives and a few strings and a voice that was somehow scratched by heaven.".[28]
Personal life
Brennan and Waits live in northern California and have three children.[29]
^Montandon, Mac, ed. (2007). Innocent When You Dream: Tom Waits, The Collected Interviews. Orion. p. 257. ISBN978-0752881263. Retrieved December 4, 2022. Waits and Brennan met in 1980. He was in a small office at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope studios, working on the score for One from the Heart. She was a script editor at Zoetrope. He was listening to Captain Beefheart, Howlin' Wolf, and Ethiopian music. She encouraged him to take more risks in his writing—to, Waits says, "distort the world." After they were married, Waits made Swordfishtrombones.
^Montandon, Mac, ed. (2007). Innocent When You Dream: Tom Waits, The Collected Interviews. Orion. p. 341. ISBN978-0752881263. He insists that she's the truly creative force in the relationship, the feral influence who challenges his "pragmatic" limitations and stirs intrigue into all their music. ("She has dreams like Hieronymus Bosch . . . She'll start talking in tongues and I'll take it all down.") He says, "she speaks to my subtext, not my context." He claims she has expanded his vision so enormously as an artist that he can hardly bear to listen to any of the music he wrote before they met.