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
I'm not one of those people the tabloids chase around.
The average person spends two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic light to change.
You just write and you don't try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it.
New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations.
I don't know what the 'big time' is.
It's terrible for the culture of music. Like anything that is purely economic, it ignores the most important component.
All medical procedures require two hands, so in a sense it's like when you play an instrument. That's what they call things that they use in their work: They call them instruments. A lot of people start out majoring in medicine and drop it and change their major to music.
My wife, when I met her, she had a remarkable record collection. And they were all still in their sleeves! I couldn't believe it. She took care of her records. Rachmaninov, Beefheart. For me, most of my records were out of their sleeves and in a drawer somewhere. I married a record collection.
People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it's an indication that the songs aren't so ultra-personal that they can't possibly be interpreted by anyone else.
I like vocal word stuff. But I don't always write with an instrument, I usually write a capella. It's more like drawing in the air with your fingers. It's closest to the choreography of a bee. You're freer.
Most changes in music, most exciting things that happen in music, occur through a miscommunication between people "I thought you said this." Poetry comes out of that too.
I think some bands thrive on the idea of changing instruments. When they're off their real instrument, the ability to go very far from the original idea is reduced.
I like writing melody without an instrument. It's just so - it's more like the choreography of a bee; you just go.
Sometimes words are just music themselves. Like 'Chicago' is a very musical sounding name.