Tom Waits was featured on today’s segment of the NPR show Fresh Air. The iconic artist talked with host Terry Gross about his phenomenal new record Bad As Me, his first all-new studio album in eight years and his 20th album.
On Getting Older Waits offers, “I guess I’ve always lived upside down when I want things I can’t have. My wife actually thinks I have a syndrome called Reality Distortion Field. It’s kind of like drugs, only you can’t come back from it. Reality Distortion is almost a permanent condition. Things come in and they go out: Presto, chango! To a certain extent, I did that with myself. As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.”
And on Collaborating With Keith Richards he says, “There’s nobody in the world like him. We wrote songs together for a while and that was fun. I had never really written with anybody besides my wife, so it was unique and a little scary at first. He doesn’t really remember anything or write anything down. So you play for an hour and he would yell across the room, ‘Scribe!’ And I looked around. ‘Scribe? Who’s the scribe?’ And he’d say it again, now pointing at me. I was supposed to have written down everything we said and dreamt of and played. And I realized we needed an adult in the room. I’ve never been the one that one would consider the adult. It was an interesting dynamic.”
Listen to the full interview above or at NPR by going here.
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