If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.
— Tom Waits
I didn't really want to be part of a clique or a niche. But I also was looking for my own voice, as a writer, y'know? And a world I could call my own.
I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture.
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
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.
If people are a little nervous about approaching you at the market, it's good. I'm not Chuckles The Clown. Or Bozo. I don't cut the ribbon at the opening of markets. I don't stand next to the mayor. Hit your baseball into my yard, and you'll never see it again.
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.
I look for things that are left of center, something you've only seen your whole life, but never heard. Hit it! With a stick! I have a guitar made out of a 2x4 that I bought in Cleveland.
I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3 A.M.
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.
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 don't like listening to records a lot after they're done. There's just no real nourishment there for me.
I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
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.
Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.
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 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.
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.
The only thing worse than being in the Hall of Fame is not being in the Hall of Fame.
People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.
Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.
My first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.
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.
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 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.
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 don't really like listening to the radio so much.
I bark my voice out through a closed throat, pretty much. It's more, perhaps, like a dog in some ways. It does have its limitations, but I'm learning different ways to keep it alive.
You hope people are going to be listening to you after you're gone. And they like you better after you're gone.
Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it.
I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I'm an amateur physician, I guess.
You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty. I don't want to live any other way.
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.
When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that.
I have an audio stigmatism whereby I hear things wrong - I have audio illusions.
Some day I'm gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it.
Oh, I got a beautiful 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille four-door. No one will ride in it with me.
I didn't really identify with the music of my own generation, but I was very curious about the music of others.
I have a Chamberlain I bought from some surfers in Westwood many years ago. It's an early analog synthesizer; it operates on tape loops. It has 60 voices - everything from galloping horses to owls to rain to every instrument in the orchestra.
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 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.
Sometimes words are just music themselves. Like 'Chicago' is a very musical sounding name.
If you are recording, you are recording. I don't believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal.
When you're a kid and you're trying to find your own voice, it's rather daunting to hear somebody like Howlin' Wolf, because you know that you'll never achieve that.
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.
Any place is good for eavesdropping, if you know how to eavesdrop.
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.
Don't look back, because someone might be gaining on you.
