When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
Tom WaitsRead
I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music.
Interpretation
The division of music genres is influenced more by marketing than by artistic merit, negatively impacting music culture.
Tom Waits comments on how the strict classifications of music genres are largely a product of marketing strategies rather than genuine artistic distinctions. He expresses concern that this artificial division hampers the overall culture of music by limiting creativity and cross-genre experimentation.
In practice
In a discussion about the evolution of music at a cultural forum.
When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.
I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
Don't plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke 'em down to nothing.
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
Now its raining its pouring the old man is snoring now I lay me down to sleep I hear the sirens in the street all my dreams are made of chrome I have no way to get back home Iβd rather die before I wake like Marilyn Monroe and throw my dreams out in the street and the rain make βem grow
My music is best understood by children and animals.
One thing is for sure-none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring.
Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.
Food is about making an interaction with ingredients. If you talk to them, they will always tell you a story.
We are all instruments pulling the bows across our own lungs. Windmills, still startling in every storm. Have you ever seen a newborn blinking at the light? I wanna do that every day. I wanna know what the kite called itself when it got away, when it escaped into the night.
And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws.
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