Tom Waits
Tom Waits
Thomas Alan Waitsis an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding like "it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car." With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock music styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music, Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPop Singer
Date of Birth7 December 1949
CityPomona, CA
CountryUnited States of America
Well, it's either kiss me or kill me, that's how I see it.
George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.
All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.
Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs.
Any place is good for eavesdropping, if you know how to eavesdrop.
Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting.
Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.
It's hard to win when you always lose.
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have.
I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We're all looking at the wrapping. But we won't tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath.
For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.
I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I'm an amateur physician, I guess.
George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.