(b. 1949– )
U.S. singer-songwriter, actor, and composer
Tom Waits
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.
Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, by Barney Hoskyns (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010), 276.
Q: Do you have words to live by?
A: Jim Jarmusch once told me “Fast, Cheap, and Good…pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it wont be good. If it’s cheap and good it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good it wont be cheap.” Fast, cheap, and good…pick (2) words to live by.
“Tom Waits Spills the Beans to Tom Waits,” Sound Effects Blog, Boston Globe, May 22, 2008.
I feel, sometimes, like I have a map in my pocket that folds up, and I pull it out, and it’s bigger than the table, and there’s a thousand places to go with her.
Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, NPR, October 31, 2011. [full transcript here]
Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and then throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.
“Play It Like Your Hair’s On Fire,” by Elizabeth Gilbert in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2003 (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003), 100.
If you break open a song, you’ll find the eggs of other songs.
Twitter, Dec 15, 2011
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. You know, and you just do it by picking up the needle and putting it back down and figuring out how these people did this magical thing. It’s like—it’s rather mystifying when you think about songs, where they come from and how they’re born.
Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, NPR, October 31, 2011. [full transcript here]
Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air.
Induction speech, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, originally broadcast on Fuse TV, March 20, 2011.
They say that I have no hits and I’m difficult to work with, and they say that like it’s a bad thing.
Induction speech, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, originally broadcast on Fuse TV, March 20, 2011.
I think hardware stores can be fascinating if you go in there with a mallet!
Interview by Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork, posted November 27, 2006.
I have a guitar made out of a 2×4 that I bought in Cleveland. You know, in Iraq, you can’t have a guitar in the window of a music store because it’s too sexy. You know, the curves. So I could go over there with these 2×4 guitars and really take the country by storm.
Pitchfork, interview by Amanda Petrusich, posted November 27, 2006.
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.
Pitchfork, interview by Amanda Petrusich, posted November 27, 2006.
There are only two things you can throw out the window of a moving car, legally. Do you know what they are?…Water. And feathers. Everything else you can get in trouble for.
Pitchfork, interview by Amanda Petrusich, posted November 27, 2006.