Tom Waits on being 'different'

"My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day.



I told them this story:



In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day."

 

Related posting: Quoting Tom Waits: LINK

 


photographs of Tom Waits by Anton Corbijn via and via and via and via; quote via

Quoting Tom Waits

"When I was younger, I wanted to be older. Now I am older, I am not quite so sure."
Tom Waits



'When I spent my afternoon with Waits in Santa Rosa, I remarked on the irony of a forty-nine-year-old man making grittier music than he'd made half that age. "I always start at the wrong end of everything," he said. "I don't know, maybe I'm raging against the dying light. What do you say? Youth is wasted on the young?"
He stopped and for a second became more philosophical. What he said made it clear that, for him, midlife had been far from a crisis. "Time is not a line, or a road where you get further away from things," he said. "It's all exponential. Everything that you experienced when you were eighteen is still with you."'
Hoskyns (2000)





Tom Waits Mini-Selection:

::: Jockey Full of Bourbon: LISTEN/WATCH
::: Bad As Me: LISTEN/WATCH
::: Chocolate Jesus: LISTEN/WATCH



- Hoskyns, B. (2009). Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits. London: Faber and Faber
- images by Anton Corbijn via and via and via and via and via