Quote

Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.

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
Slowly
Sometimes
Actual
Make
Sounds
Songs
Meaning
Sound
Words
Mutate
Making
Evolve

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I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture.
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I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I'm an amateur physician, I guess.
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He said, I'm better off without her, until I showed him my tattoo.
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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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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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and when they pulled her from the wreck, you know, she still had on her shades
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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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People get frightened that success is going to take them out of life. They're no longer going to be on the corner of Bedlam and Squalor life will only be something you can get through the mail.
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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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People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it's an indication that the songs aren't so ultra-personal that they can't possibly be interpreted by anyone else.
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Well, they'll bark you down like carneys, sell you Christmas cards in June.
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I danced along a colored wind/ Dangled from a rope of sand
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I took a hundred dollars from a blindman's hand.
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God's away, God's away, God's away on business. Business!
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using parking meters as walking sticks.
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If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back, it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.
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Well you say that it's gospel, But I know that it's only church.
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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.
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Most changes in music, most exciting things that happen in music, occur through a miscommunication between people I thought you said this. Poetry comes out of that too.
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The Music was like Electric Sugar
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