Zitat des Tages von Tom Waits:
Somebody said I sound like an old lady, and I was really insulted by that. I'm trying to sound like Skip James and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye.
I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page. Some people write for the page, and that's a whole other thing. I'm going for what it sounds like right away, so it may not even look good on the page.
The piano has been drinking, not me.
What you want is for music to love you back. That's why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it.
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.
Any image I have, it's just what I do, but it comes off as being very pretentious. When you're a bit in the public astigmatism, anything you do seems like you did it so somebody would see you do it, like showing up at the right parties.
Don't look back, because someone might be gaining on you.
I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music.
I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas.
I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.
The sight of the first woman in the minimal two-piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the U.S. at Bikini Island in the Marshall Isles, hence the naming of the bikini.
I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.
I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have.
It's hard to win when you always lose.
Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.
If you are making a record, you are the one saying 'action', and you are the one saying 'cut,' and you have to be sure that the most interesting thing is not going on outside the frame.
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.
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.
I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that.
I'm just trying to make a buck like everyone else.
I don't know if any genuine, meaningful change could ever result from a song. It's kind of like throwing peanuts at a gorilla.
Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.
George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.
Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.
Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way.
There's not much difference between what I appear to be on stage and what I am. I think people like that, that I'm not trying to pull a caper.
I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.
If you are recording, you are recording. I don't believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal.
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.
Any place is good for eavesdropping, if you know how to eavesdrop.
The only thing worse than being in the Hall of Fame is not being in the Hall of Fame.
I saw a crow building a nest, I was watching him very carefully, I was kind of stalking him and he was aware of it. And you know what they do when they become aware of someone stalking them when they build a nest, which is a very vulnerable place to be? They build a decoy nest. It's just for you.
I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.
If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back, it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.
But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.
