🎧 Tom Waits’ songs that inspired ‘Bad As Me’ (Take 5)

Listened Tom Waits on finding his voice: ‘I don’t really think there is anything genuinely new under the sun’ from Double J

Tom Waits opens up about the mystery of songwriting and the melting pot of influences he draws from.

Zan Rowe speaks with Tom Waits about the songs that inspired his album ‘Bad As Me’. It is one of those interviews that carries you away and leaves you seeing the world in a different light. Some of the notable thoughts were music as captured air:

Tunes are in the air … writing them down is like letter air out of a balloon and then naming it.

Songs living within us after we hear then:

Songs kind of live within you once you hear them, there is nothing new, we are all just doing bad impersonations of each other.

Life as planting seeds:

That’s really what we hope for … plant a few seeds and then we go. We are all just drawing in the dirt with a stick.

Songs in songs and voices in voices:

I think inside every song there are other songs. But I also think, inside your voice, there are other voices that you have yet to discover and that’s kind of why you are here.

Completeness of recorded music:

Until a song’s recorded it isn’t really finished. Regardless of what your plan is, the song itself has a plan of its own. You need to be sensitive to that. Sometimes you need to get out of the way. You need to know when to duck.

After listening for a second time, I was left thinking about the episode with Damian Cowell and how the truth was not what was important, instead it was about a world seen with fresh eyes.

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