Tom Verlaine (born Thomas Miller, December 13, 1949) is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist, best known as the frontman of the New York City rock band Television.
With my records, it's just a matter of trying to create something fresh for myself in a very finite context, which is the pop song. I don't know anything about the people who buy my records, and what, if anything, they get out of them.
I've seen a lot of people getting into Jazzmasters because of me, and, well, people don't know what they're in for. I mean if you're looking for endless sustain, you're going to have to get it out of your hands (laughs). Because a saxophonist gets it out of his breath. You've got to work for it on the guitar - it means you have to pull it out of yourself, otherwise, what are you doing? You end up playing a lot of noise or scale exercises.
Boogie! I hate boogie, God, I mean, not the Chicago boogie like Willie Dixon or Howlin' Wolf, but all those awful white bands.
I like thinking of myself as invisible. I find it a very advantageous way to live. Unfortunately, its not the way the music business works. If you don't create some kind of public image, it gets created for you.
I always hated jazz guitar. I loved jazz saxophone but I hated jazz guitar. If I would buy an organ trio record I would make sure I'd buy one that did not have a guitar player on it. The sound was awful!
The whole reputation of being a rock guitar player, I could really care less about it. Still, when I hear new groups today I do occasionally hear something where I think. . . ahh, I've heard that lick before.
Johnny Jewel is how people were maybe two hundred years ago. Back then, when people got up in the morning, they knew what they had to do to get through the day - there were 100% less decisions. Nowadays, we have to decide what we want to buy in grocery stores, what job to take, what work to do. But not Johnny. For him, it's all right there - it's a freer state, and that's what my music is looking for. . . . . . To understand Johnny, you should think of William Blake. He was the same kinda guy.
Practice? I never practice. I just write songs and take solos.
I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.
I just don't like people coming up to me and saying something. It immediately makes you become insincere. There is no way you can react to it sincerely.
What's really fun is to write under different names.
I'm not even sure who my audience is.
The Beat thing happened when I was younger. I used to run away from home, inspired by the Beats, like in '64 and '65.
I never liked mellow sounding guitar.
It's like first grade where you make all your mistakes and people see it and yet some people see that there's something there that's really valuable. That's the way it went for more than 2 years almost 3 years of playing.
You know, there is something I'm looking for when I'm writing. But I couldn't tell you what that is.
I write a lot of more instrumental music than I do vocal music. It's because I come out of a background of playing piano and then playing sax for a number of years. I kind of got into rock backwards. A lot of guys go into rock and then get sick of it and then go into something else. I came the other way, so I've always just had a lot more stuff lying around.
All the Frank O'Hara types seem to have very little sound stuff going. . . it's so chatty or something.
I grew up taking piano lessons and liking Wagner when I was in second grade.
Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what a person does themselves. That's why I never mention these things. You can read a detective novel you really like, but it had no bearing on what you do yourself, you just think, "God, how this guy wove this together!" Or you get into the energy of it. Or you see a poem which makes a great statement about sentiment, but it's not sentimental.