Robert Jackson Bennett is thinking over on his blog today about the obligation an author has to his audience and why originality in art is so important, from Louis C.K. to Tom Waits. Check it out.

[Tom] Waits had a dependable night club schtick well into the 80’s, popular with a decent-sized demographic – a boozy, romantic, down-on-his-luck hipster, a callback to Kerouac and Bukowski. But Waits eventually got sick of it, and wanted to do something new.

When his producer, Bones Howe, heard what Waits wanted to try, he advised against it. He’d lose his audience, he’d lose all his contracts, and most of all, he’d lose Bones himself. But Bones’s reasoning wasn’t that it was bad, but that it wasn’t accessible – he said, “I knew that where [Tom] wanted to go, I couldn’t follow.” Suggesting that no one else could, either.

But Waits, despite the advice of nearly everyone around him, trusted his vision. He did not listen to his producers, or his fanbase, but went out and did his own thing. And what he made was and is wholly original. For a long time, it was impossible to describe a Tom Waits album – it was just that, a Tom Waits album, and there was no other word for it.

Robert’s third book, The Troupe, will be out in February (US | UK | ANZ). You may also remember that he recently won the Shirley Jackson Award and the Sydney J. Bounds Award for his first novel, Mr. Shivers.