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Encyclopedia of Popular Music
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Bone Machine is a critically acclaimed and award-winning album by Tom Waits, released in 1992 on Island Records. It won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album, and features guest appearances by Los Lobos' David Hidalgo, Primus' Les Claypool and Brain, and The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards.

Bone Machine marked a return to studio material for Waits, coming a full five years after his previous studio album, Franks Wild Years (1987). The album is often noted for its dark lyrical themes of death and murder, and for its rough, stripped-down, percussion-heavy blues rock style.

Bone Machine was included on many Best Albums of the 1990s lists, including Pitchfork Media where it was number 49, and Rolling Stone where it was number 53.

Bone Machine was recorded and produced entirely at the Prairie Sun Recording studios in Cotati, California in a room of Studio C known as "the Waits Room," in the old cement hatchery rooms of the cellar of the buildings.

Mark "Mooka" Rennick, Prairie Sun studio chief said:

[Waits] gravitated toward these "echo" rooms and created the Bone Machine aural landscape. [...] What we like about Tom is that he is a musicologist. And he has a tremendous ear. His talent is a national treasure.

Waits said of the bare-bones studio, "I found a great room to work in, it's just a cement floor and a hot water heater. Okay, we'll do it here. It's got some good echo." References to the recording environment and process were made in the field-recorded interview segments made for the promotional CD release, Bone Machine: The Operator's Manual, which threaded together full studio tracks and conversation for a pre-recorded radio show format.

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