Photo: Derek Ridgers, 1992
Tom Waits: Well, the only reason to write new songs is because you're tired of the old ones, that's really all it is. Or I'm hungry for something that doesn't have a name, that you can't find in the store. So you go home and you make it.
You kind of go into the world of a song. They're not necessarily autobiographical, sometimes you inhabit the lives of others. Or it's just a daydream. Songs kind of write themselves sometimes. It's like you're kind of walking out on the diving board and you keep walking until you fall in the water and every line keeps you in the air and if you come up with a bad line you fall into the water. I don't know how it works. If I did I'd probably stop doing it.
Sometimes I’ll listen to records of my own stuff and I think, `God, the original idea for this was so much better than the mutation that we arrived at. What I’m trying to do now is get what comes through, and keep it alive.
It’s like carrying water in your hands. I want to keep it all and sometimes, by the time you get to the studio, you have nothing.
There’s a certain kind of musical dexterity that you can arrive at that actually punishes a certain point in your development, or moves past it, It happens all the time with me, the three-chord syndrome.
And then if you try to ask a Barney Kessel to cut a simple thing, just a big block brick of chords, just dirty, fat, loud, mean and cryptic – no, he’s a hand-writer. He’s developed to that level.
Larry Taylor, this bass player I work with from Canned Heat, if he can’t feel it, will put down his bass and walk away, and say That’s it, man. I can’t get it. And I really respect that. I said, ‘Well, thank you for telling me.’ "
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