David Thomas

 

'Q: Do you consider yourself a singer-songwriter in the Bob Dylan - Lou Reed - Tom Waits vein?
A: No. Those guys are poets, working with a love of the poetic aesthetic. I don't like poetry. Mostly, it bores the life out of me. Those guys love words. I hate words. They read Pynchon or Faulkner or Rimbaud. I read Hemingway. They studied the arts. I studied science. I like to tell stories with as few words as possible and as little intervention as possible. I describe what I see as clinically as possible. I want to cram as much information into a three minute song as can be done. And that requires using every drop of sound to tell the story, as well as the voice, as well as words that interact not with emotions or intellect but directly with the hieroglyphic language of the human consciousness. That ain't poetry. That's journalism.'