Tom Waits Quotes About Songs

Quotes about: Songs

• Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Writing, Bird

  FaceBook post by Tom Waits from Nov 11, 2009

• I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Eye, Ears

• Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Thinking, Smoking

• Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don't care if they lose it; they'll just make another one.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Children, Kids

• If you can make a little painting for the ears with a few words, well, I like words; I like cutting them up and finding different ways of saying the same thing... I get into a spell, and it all comes easy. I don't labor over it. I go inside the song, I think you make yourself an antenna for songs, and songs want to be around you. And then they bring other songs along, and then they're all sitting around, and they're drinkin' your beer, and they're sleeping on the floor. And they are using the phone, they're rude, thankless little f---ers.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Drinking, Sleep

  "Waits In Wonderland". Image Magazine Interview with Rip Rense, December 13, 1992.

• Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing
  with the air.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Air, Interesting

  "Watch: Tom Waits joined by Neil Young on RnR Hall of Fame performance" by Katie Hasty, uproxx.com. April 12, 2011.

• Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Demand, Way

• I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Couple, Thinking

  Interview with The Onion A.V. Club, www.avclub.com. May 29, 2002.

• Well you wave your hand and they scatter like crows
  They have nothing that will ever capture your heart
  They're just thorns without the rose
  Be careful of them in the dark
  Oh, if I was the one you chose to be your only one
  Oh baby can't you hear me now, can't you hear me now
  Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
  Every night it's just the same, you leave me lonely now

  Tom Waits

  Song, Baby, Lonely

• Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On

  Tom Waits

  Song, Home, Records

  Song: Hold On, Album: Mule Variations

• Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Years, Musician

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

  Tom Waits

  Goodbye, Song, Rope

  "Tom Waits: 'I look like hell but I'm going to see where it gets me" by Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. October 22, 2011.

• I don't know if any genuine meaningful change could ever result from a song. It's kind of like throwing peanuts at a gorilla.

  Tom Waits

  Meaningful, Song, Gorillas

  "Off beat". Interview with Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. October 28, 2006.

• 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

  Song, Morning, Writing

  Interview with The Onion A.V. Club, www.avclub.com. May 29, 2002.

• 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.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Children, Men

  "Tom Waits gives the devil his due". Interview with Xan Brooks, www.theguardian.com. October 8, 2009.

• I don't like hearing Beatles songs in commercials. It almost renders them useless. I think, 'Oh God, another one bites the dust.'

  Tom Waits

  Song, Thinking, Dust

• 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

  Song, Sound, Sometimes

  Interview with Amanda Petrusich, pitchfork.com. November 27, 2006.

• There's only one reason why you write new songs: You get sick of the old songs. It's not that I didn't do anything during the time when I wrote no songs. I was creative, but in another way. I had ideas for songs and collected the ideas.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Writing, Ideas

• 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.

  Tom Waits

  Song, People, Want

  Interview with Amanda Petrusich, pitchfork.com. November 27, 2006.

• Songs are pretty easy. They are small, they are modular, they are about as big as a bagel. They are easy to build. Films are overwhelming in their magnitude and scope. By comparison, a lot of film directors wish they were writing songs because you can do it while getting your hair cut.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Writing, Cutting

  Interview with Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. October 18, 2011.

• It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.wbur.org

• Every single song has its own individual character and you can't treat each song the same way, because it wants to be treated differently and there are songs that are like scared birds that you have to sneak up on over the course of months in the woods.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Character, Bird

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