A Quote by Jerry Stahl
Jake La Botz is a creator of dark poetry and haunting song, the kind of music that gets in your bones and rides you for days, a sound and vision only those who've been to the bottom and clawed their way back up can generate. His midnight gifts evoke Hank Williams and Skip James as much as Tom Waits and Dylan. Not everybody will get this music - because not everybody is ready for the truth.
Related Quotes
I'd love to do a song with Tom Waits. Around when I was like 17 or 18, my buddy, D-Money, put me on the Tom Waits and I literally at that point got every one of his albums and kind of studied his music. I like that he provides an entire world for the listener. He's hopefully someone that I could vibe with down the line. I'm not sure how it would sound or even how it could work, but he's always been a huge influence.
I heard Tom Waits in this kinky shop on Belmont Street in Chicago. Considering the way I was raised, they were such obscure voices, but their music saved my life - I didn't know who I was before I heard Bob Dylan and Tom Waits.
For me, and this may not be everybody, but because I do love country music so much, there's such a feeling of home in Nashville, especially because it's such a small town. You bring up one song, everybody knows who wrote it, everybody knows their mother and what their cell number is, and all of the stories.
In an odd way I thought I was lowering the bar for myself, in saying, well, I'll make a pop album. But in a way it's kind of harder to make pop music. It's like the more abstract you get with music, you get into that emperor's new clothes thing, where you can go anywhere, and just claim that your audience may not be prepared to go with you. But with pop music, I think everybody understands the form, everybody knows what it's meant to do. So I would say it's harder to write that kind of music.
I realized a lot of my friends were going to nightclubs and listening to house music. I was hanging out with them and going to clubs as well but I didn't really understand that kind of music. I was listening to country music and was heavily into Hank Williams, bluegrass, and Bob Dylan. So I just decided I really needed to understand what this music I was hearing in the clubs was all about.
A panoramic vision of Bob Dylan, his music, his shifting place in American culture, from multiple angles. In fact, reading Sean Wilentz's Bob Dylan in America is as thrilling and surprising as listening to a great Dylan song.
My country stuff, it might sound like Hank Williams - that's just the way it is. But I'd rather sound like Hank Williams than Trace Atkins.
If you read about a tree, and there is a description, you have to grow that tree in your mind. So that's an active way of looking at media, whereas a movie or a TV will be passive, because they are showing you the tree. In the same way, when somebody sings a song for you, those words get so much in the foreground, that even if you take a minor key of music and then put like happy lyrics to it and people think it's a happy song. So, in a song, you are told what to feel, whereas, in an instrumental music, you get as much out of it as you are willing to put into it.
I think what happened is that everybody's impressions got formed in those first few minutes. And I felt like, by the latter part of it, I kind of clawed my way back into the discussion. But everybody's impressions were set at the beginning. And wholly apart from me and whether I was good or bad, you know, there were a lot of hostile questions.
I want to set the record straight for everybody who's been waiting to hear my music. The song that's out on the internet is an incomplete song that I'm still working on. When it's ready, you'll be hearing it from me.
I'm a fan of music, some rock music. But I like many types of music. But I suppose a kind of longstanding love of specific bands would be Radiohead, Wilco, Neil Young, Tom Waits, REM.
I am right at the bottom compared to everybody else with press kits and demos and trying to get meetings. That's what I love about music and hate about it. That's why I respect people that are successful in the music business because you really have to build it from the ground up.
I know it sounds weird, but the kind of music I write isn't the kind of music that I listen to, which is quite underground, left-of-centre stuff like PJ Harvey and Tom Waits.
What I look for in music is artistry, sincerity, and simplicity, and Tom Waits has all of that. I want to make a connection to the creator.
I think music is better listened to with other people. Music is better shared. It depends what situation you're in - if it's a song by Tom Waits, it can be nice to be on your own, but if it's something slightly more upbeat, it's amazing to be around people.
You must hold on to the sort of finger-painting aspect of music. That's something I learned, particularly from listening to Neil Young. Tom Waits is another one, because Tom's music is incredibly sophisticated and beautifully arranged, but he's using a toolbox that's unlike anybody else's.
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