The Dyes of Patch 2

The next main influence to my songwriting doesn't happen to be an artist I listen to every day. I like half of his songs, I get bored from the other half. But I respect his whole repertoire due to the way that he carries himself as an artist. He blends reality and fiction into a whole where you're not sure where the story begins and the true artist ends. He has made a complete ethos out of himself, as much an actor as he is a musician. He is a more "down-to-earth" version of my number one influence. A more folky version. A lighter version. More quirky and campy.

One extreme in my songwriting to my number one's other extreme.

This man is Tom Waits.

His more straight ahead blues songs, his ballads, I don't much care for. It's the weird stuff, the stuff where you can hear the room ambience in the recording, where his gruff scream is the ultimate delivery, where bones are played instead of regular drums, where the theatricality of it all comes out. I picture some basement of a dive bar to be the locale for Tom Waits' music. A strange cabaret where something isn't quite right, but you'll go along for the ride. I like when an artist prompts the audience to constantly question the sanity of the man/woman behind the work.

I dabble in simplistic production from time to time. Set up pots and pans in a room, play a simple acoustic riff, and scream from across the room. It adds character and depth to the personality of the music. Mr. Waits is excellent at portraying character.

One of the best examples of Tom's work for my influence would be his song "Earth Died Screaming" from the album Bone Machine, and one of the main songs from the "12 Monkeys" soundtrack. It was actually the first song I heard of his. I thought it was special, a dark voice with such a strange personality to it. So much is going in the way he conveys the message, but it's done in such a simplistic way. There are bones for percussion, a distorted blues guitar, and Tom's voice. That's it, except for the Death song excerpt at the end. Hearing this song, it makes me want to find a random venue, not traditional, where the band takes garbage cans, water jugs, chains, one guitar and one amp (one of lesser quality) and put on a show entirely in this magnitude. I wrote a song called "Whisper a Scream" which consisted just of metal on stone hits and vocals. A lot of "In Hopes to Mend" is inspired by Tom Waits, as well. One of the main features of the bridge is a bongo drum played with me holding keys loosely in my right hand. I put the reverb up in such a way as to suggest that I played it in a lone basement room, which is where the song takes place.

A basement room not unlike the one I picture Tom to claim as his performance throne.

Tom Waits -- "Earth Died Screaming"