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
It's very hard to stop doing things you're used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.
Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don't get out much. It's true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.
I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.
The way you do anything is the way you do everything.
I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.
I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.
The fact is most of the things that people know about me are made up. My own life is backstage. So what you "know" about me is only what I allowed you to know about me.
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.
I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have.
This is about all the bad days in the world. I used to have some little bad days, and I kept them in a little box. And one day, I threw them out into the yard. "Oh, it's just a couple little innocent bad days." Well, we had a big rain. I don't know what it was growing in but I think we used to put eggshells out there and coffee grounds, too. Don't plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me. Choke those little bad days. Choke 'em down to nothin'. They're your days. Choke 'em!
The folks who know the truth aren't talking.... The ones who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up!
You cannot really be too concerned with what people think of you. You're on your own adventure of growth and discovery. So it's not always good to be who people think you are, especially if you subscribe to it as well ... which is easily done, because then you don't have to figure out who you are, you just ask somebody else.
I'll take a rusty nail and scratch your initials on my arm.
They have removed the struggle to find anything. And therefore there is no genuine sense of discovery. Struggle is the first thing we know getting along the birth canal, out in the world. It's pretty basic. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you'd go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that's gone.