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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: 74
Born: 1949
Born: December 7
Actor
Composer
Guitarist
Jazz Guitarist
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Pomona
California
Thomas Alan Waits
Song
Lullaby
Rope
Goodbye
Jump
Tales
Road
Aren
Lullabies
Songs
Cautionary

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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.
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Well it's hotter 'n blazes and all the long faces / there'll be no oasis for a dry local grazier
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Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.
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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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I don't really like listening to the radio so much.
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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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If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man.
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Well, they'll bark you down like carneys, sell you Christmas cards in June.
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I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
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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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You cannot really be too concerned with what people think of you. You're on your own adventure of growth and discovery. So it's not always good to be who people think you are, especially if you subscribe to it as well ... which is easily done, because then you don't have to figure out who you are, you just ask somebody else.
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All that you've loved is all you own
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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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We are all just monkeys with money and guns.
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There's a beauty of show business. It's the only business you can have a career in when you're dead.
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I just don't like the word 'fun'--it's like Volkswagen, or bell-bottoms, or patchouli-oil or bean-sprouts...it rubs me up the wrong way.
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Now it's closing time/the music's fading out.
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She's a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck...she's outta this world...she's bold, inventive and fearless. That's who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.
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I like turning on two radios at once. I like hearing things wrong… I get a lot of ideas by mishearing things.
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I'm the type of guy who'd sell you a rat's asshole for a wedding ring.
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