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
The piano has been drinking, not me.
You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it's hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs.
The Universe is making music all the time.
it ain't no sin, to take off your skin and dance around in your bones
I'm so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.
Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.
I've been riding on the crest of a slump lately.
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.
I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have. My wife actually thinks I have a syndrome called Reality Distortion Field. It's kind of like drugs, only you can't come back from it. Reality Distortion is almost a permanent condition. Things come in and they go out: Presto, chango! To a certain extent, I did that with myself. As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.
You learn as much from your kids as they learn from you.
Arithmetic arithmetock Turn the hands back on the clock How does the ocean rock the boat? How did the razor find my throat? The only strings that hold me here Are tangled up around the pier.
They say that I have no hits and that I'm difficult to work with. And they say that like it's a bad thing.
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.
It's a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.