Tom Waits said this quote

“ 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. ”

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My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else? they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you. And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest. So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

~ Tom Waits

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

~ Tom Waits

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, What happened to your hand? And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

~ Tom Waits

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

~ Tom Waits