Tom Waits
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Tom Waits is an American singer, songwriter, composer, actor, and writer whose output spans experimental music, rock, jazz, and blues. Born on December 7, 1949, in Pomona, California, he has worked across these genres as both a performing musician and a composer, demonstrating range as a jazz guitarist and jazz pianist in addition to his work as a vocalist.
Waits attended O'Farrell Community School before going on to Hilltop High School, and he later studied at Southwestern College. His early formation in Southern California preceded a career in which he became active across multiple creative disciplines, working in English as his primary language of expression.
As a singer-songwriter and composer, Waits has operated at the intersection of several musical traditions. His associations with jazz, blues, rock, and experimental music reflect a practice that resists easy categorization, drawing on a broad range of sonic and compositional approaches. His work as an actor has run alongside his music career, extending his presence across different areas of the performing arts.
Waits received induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a recognition that acknowledged his contributions as a musician and songwriter working across rock and related genres. That induction stands as a formal marker within a career defined by its movement across experimental, jazz, blues, and rock idioms.
Quotes by Tom Waits
Tom Waits's insights on:
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.
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.
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. You find that out really fast.
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
You know, people only travel really with their seeds, and with their songs. In Bosnia they interviewed a lot of refugees... they’d left with nothing and they asked them what they had, and they had seeds in their pockets from their gardens and their songs. That was it. Once you’re nourished in that most fundamental way, everything else follows.
They called it the Terminal Bar but they had no idea that like twenty years later the place’d be filling up with terminal cases.
And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget that history puts a saint in every dream.