Tom Waits on Tom Waits Quotes

“Jim Jarmusch once told me Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it won’t be good. If it’s cheap and good, it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good, it won’t be cheap. Fast, cheap and good … pick two words to live by.

Tom Waits”
― Paul Maher Jr., Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters

“TW: Never have your wallet with you onstage. It’s bad luck. You shouldn’t play the piano with money in your pocket. Play like you need the money.”
― Paul Maher Jr., Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters

“In America you have to control your diet very carefully. If you feed on things that are easy and accessible, that’s what you put out yourself. The kind of exciting chemical explosions which take place when you’re experimenting are much more likely to occur if you make mad choices.”
― Paul Maher Jr., Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters

“A lot of artists try to be eccentric, but for Tom Waits, it comes naturally. He's an expert of sorts on the most peculiar of subjects, like the daily lives of ants.”
― Paul Maher Jr., Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters

“Another innovation on Franks Wild Years is the prevalence of the bullhorn, which Waits sings through on at least four cuts. “Well, I tried to obtain that same sound in other ways,” he explains, “by using broken microphones, singing into tin cans, cupping my hands around the microphone, putting the vocal through an Auratone speaker, which is like a car radio speaker, and then miking that. Practically even considered at one point making a record and then broadcasting the record through like a radio station and then having it come out of the car and then mike the car … and then it just became too complicated, you know? So a bullhorn seemed to be the answer to it all.”
― Paul Maher Jr., Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters

“The creative process is imagination, memories, nightmares, and dismantling certain aspects of this world and putting them back together in the dark. Songs aren’t necessarily verbatim chronicles or necessarily journal entries, they’re like smoke, it’s like it’s made out of smoke. The stuff that makes a song … well, usually a song will remind you of something, it will take you back somewhere and make you think of somebody or someplace. They’re like touchstones, or a mist.”
― Paul Maher Jr., Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters