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Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs.

Tom Waits

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Tom Waits
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: December 7
Actor
Composer
Guitarist
Jazz Guitarist
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Pomona
California
Thomas Alan Waits
Aren
Lullabies
Songs
Cautionary
Song
Lullaby
Rope
Goodbye
Jump
Tales
Road

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There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.
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We are all just monkeys with money and guns.
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A mental midget with the IQ of a fence post.
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Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
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but it's so hard to dance that way when it's cold and there's no music.
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And the earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming.
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I was born in the back seat of a Yellow Cab in a hospital loading zone and with the meter still running. I emerged needing a shave and shouted 'Time Square, and step on it!'
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I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in.
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Now it's closing time/the music's fading out.
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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.
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Photos are profound because they have such short lives. They are more like fingerprints, dead leaves, rain puddles, or the corpses of flies.
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I’ve never met anyone who made it with a chick because they owned a Tom Waits album. I’ve got all three, and it’s never helped me.
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All medical procedures require two hands, so in a sense it's like when you play an instrument. That's what they call things that they use in their work: They call them instruments. A lot of people start out majoring in medicine and drop it and change their major to music.
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when your down on your luck and you've lost all your dreams theres nothing like a campfire and a can of beans
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You just write and you don't try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it.
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It's terrible for the culture of music. Like anything that is purely economic, it ignores the most important component.
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The things you absorb you will ultimately secrete. It's all out there and available for you to enjoy...and be nourished by.
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I was always laughing in church.
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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.
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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.
Tom Waits