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I was not in touch with reality. Growing up, I was being shielded without my knowing it, because even all the way up to the age of 15, I made these paper basketball men and played with them, like action figures.

Willis Earl Beal

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Willis Earl Beal
Age: 54
Musician
Record Producer
Singer-Songwriter
Songwriter
Chicago
Illinois
Like
Knowing
Age
Shielded
Action
Touch
Reality
Played
Without
Basketball
Even
Figures
Made
Paper
Men
Growing

More quotes by Willis Earl Beal

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If the only thing that you want to do is make money - if that's your whole motivation - I think you're lying to yourself. If the only motivation you have is to make money and make it, what's making it? Oh, you get a yacht or an island. Well, you're going to need someone to be on that island. You're going to need people, one way or another.
Willis Earl Beal
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I don't know what people want. I have delusions of grandeur, but I'm not sitting here talking to you and thinking that I'm the goddamn President. I want to know everything, but I just can't.
Willis Earl Beal
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I deteriorate. I might tell you something one day and then something else another day. You fold in on yourself and that's why this whole artistry thing is the devil. It's evil. I hope I don't succumb to it.
Willis Earl Beal
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Nobody symbol occurred to me one night at my grandmother's house. The eyes are an inversion of X'd out eyes - the man is enlightened. His teeth are clenched. It's not a smiley face. It's right before he dies. It plays into my philosophy where everybody gets enlightened before they die.
Willis Earl Beal
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I would much rather not be the center of attention, and I'd much rather travel and be writing my novel, rather than standing on a stage and trying to get people to understand something.
Willis Earl Beal
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You got this new breed of hipster chicks and hipster men that don't understand anything about sacrifice. They didn't lay it on the line. People like Cat Power, Tom Waits, they are the last of the beats, the real true philosophers.
Willis Earl Beal
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I'd rather be somewhere building a house, if I knew how. The whole idea of being a professional artist is like a demeaning kind of thing.
Willis Earl Beal
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People tend to believe that I want to make soul music, which is not entirely untrue but, really, I want to be like the black Tom Waits - I don't want to make one kind of sound.
Willis Earl Beal
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Music didn't really occur to me. Michael Jordan and Batman were my favorite two entities then. Michael Jackson was there, but I didn't really get into Bob Dylan, for instance, until I was in my 20s. The record I heard of his that got me interested in singing was Knocked Out Loaded, which is what many people consider to be his worst record.
Willis Earl Beal
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That's not to say I came from the streets or anything - most of the time I was on my grandmother's back porch. I was kept in a constant state of amniotic fluid.
Willis Earl Beal
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The truth is, all products - mine included - will take you away from yourself. You can listen to this music and think its pretty cool - or not - but the only thing that's going to save your soul is going somewhere alone and staying in that place for a while. Do something for yourself.
Willis Earl Beal
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Everything that I do is limitation and complete intuition. I'm a human being. I'm not a musician. I'm not an entertainer. I don't know anything!
Willis Earl Beal
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My delusion outweighs my talent by far and it always will, because if it doesn't, then there's no point in living.
Willis Earl Beal
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I am nothing nothing is everything
Willis Earl Beal
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Everything is this distorted mishmash of pop culture that pulls from this era and that era and is just thrown at the wall. These people have no clue what anything really means. There are guys out there getting a million hits for a video.
Willis Earl Beal
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I don't mind being artificial sometimes, because I like veiling myself. I mean, I'm not honest or sincere: I am self-centered and narcissistic. I just want to be this entity.
Willis Earl Beal
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I love Lana Del Rey! It's weird because I read something that said, Oh, Willis Earl Beal and Lana Del Rey are the antithesis of each other. When in fact, she was what I wanted to sound like.
Willis Earl Beal
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The only way for me to give a good performance is to make myself extremely uncomfortable - and it just so happens that being on stage makes me extremely uncomfortable.
Willis Earl Beal
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I first saw Dead Man in high school, and it changed everything. That movie was like a memory to me - I would get things that occurred in that movie confused with my actual life.
Willis Earl Beal
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I heard Tom Waits in this kinky shop on Belmont Street in Chicago. Considering the way I was raised, they were such obscure voices, but their music saved my life - I didn't know who I was before I heard Bob Dylan and Tom Waits.
Willis Earl Beal