Member-only story
Listening As Art
“If those bad words come, I let them come in one ear and go out the other. I never let them come out of my mouth. If a bad word comes in your ear and then comes out of your mouth, it will go someplace and hurt somebody. If I did that, that hurt would come back twice as hard on me.”
–Wallace Black Elk, LAKOTA
*
“I think everybody’s looking for something they’ve never seen before. You work on your songs, but your songs also work on you. So you absorb and you excrete and in some way you retain, and slowly you start to become some place that songs are passing through. I’d like to think that they enjoy blowing through you. There’s something electric about you, maybe, some kind of a force left behind by music that passes through you. Like everybody likes to be around someone who does something well and loves doing it, so songs would be no different, right?
“You kind of go into the world of a song,” says Waits. “They’re not necessarily autobiographical, sometimes you inhabit the lives of others. Or it’s just a daydream. Songs kind of write themselves sometimes. It’s like you’re kind of walking out on the diving board and you keep walking until you fall in the water and every line keeps you in the air and if you come up with a bad line you fall into the water. I don’t know how it works. If I did I’d probably stop doing it.”
