Tom Waits is a man who places extreme importance on the aspect of intellectual culture. A singer-songwriter, an actor and a composer, a poet and an avid reader of literature, Tom Waits devours artistic information like a boozehound searching for his next drink.
Waits’ ex-girlfriend, Bobi Thomas, once described the endless nights he would tirelessly stay awake until five or six in the morning with no other companion than his mountain of reading material. “He’d tell me how inspired he was by some short story or other, and I think that was the source of his muse,” Thomas wrote in the 2009 biography Lowside of the Road. “Some writers go to the movies to get that emotional power, and then they write,” Thomas said before adding: “I think Tom got a lot of it from books.”
- Far Out
