"I wish I was Tom Waits. His songs are so visceral and bloody. I just love his use of imagery."

"There’s a funny story here. When I was with Dave Roth he would always talk about Tom Waits in a very respectful way which was rare. I never heard Dave speak reverently about anybody and I didn’t even know who Tom Waits was. I had never come across his music. But all through the years, Dave would always say, ‘Yeah, like Tom Waits’ and I’d just say ‘Yeah, yeah!’ And then I was on tour with Whitesnake and there was this band opening up called Bad English whose singer was a guy called John Waite and I thought “Wow, this was what Dave was talking about? Hmm, it’s kind of strange because it’s not the kind of singer that Dave would be reverent about.” And then I realized I had the wrong guy… So I went to the store and bought about twenty Tom Waits albums and (one of them was Mule Variations), and I remember that I was listening to all these records, getting three tracks in and literally throwing them away. Then I put Mule Variations on and stopped dead in my tracks. It completely leveled me and I can say – out of everybody I’ve talked about – Tom Waits is my favorite artist now. I completely resonate deeply with his music, his voice and his lyrics; I buy everything he ever does. He’s one of those guys who are totally at one with the creative element with no excuses or concerns about what’s going on around him – totally uncompromising.A lot of people think they’re uncompromising, but they’re not…"

"When I was seventeen, I dressed like John Lurie and Tom Waits in Down by Law. They were the apex of cool in my book. This is my favorite Jim Jarmusch movie. The “I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream” scene is classic."

"Off the top of my head I’ll say Down by Law, the Jim Jarmusch movie with Tom Waits and John Lurie and Roberto Benigni. It just has sort of a weird sense of humour and it’s a bit of a road movie itself. It’s original in a really cool way."

"Downtown Train was the first song that I remember hearing by Tom Waits. It’s a great song. It also said everything that I wanted to say. I was 17 years old and I realised that I was never going to be a great singer because I had this weird voice, so I started looking at all the guys who had weird voices: Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer and Tom Waits. I aligned myself with those guys and said, ‘OK, let me see what they’re doing. What can I do to add to it?’ Tom Waits really put the icing on the cake for me because he was all about the lyrics and the delivery – nothing else mattered. He showed me that if you mean it enough then you could do anything you want. I loved his hobo dress sense as well. He looked like all the things that I was doing at the time because I was working on cars and I would wear the jeans and the boots and the blue shirt. We’d wipe our hands on the shirts because they were thick and you could wash them and the grease would come out; we’d wear the jeans so when you were leaning on the floor your knees wouldn’t rip; and we’d wear the boots so if you dropped the carburettor it wouldn’t break your toes. So there was a purpose for everything, and that’s why I sought of had a connection with these guys. I felt like Tom Waits was my friend, and I went down the rabbit hole after discovering him."

"My personal favorite from Jim Jarmusch, one of our finest American auteurs. If as filmmakers we’re all just laboriously trying to simulate the rush of texture and emotion you get from listening to great music, no one has ever come closer to smacking the heart of a Tom Waits tune up there on the screen than Jarmusch."

"When making One Breath, I did listen to Rain Dogs. I love the way that Tom Waits uses really unusual instrumentation, like tuned marimbas, to sort of suggest chords instead of just the obvious guitar strumming changes. “Doing this was a real influence on me, using marimba and not relying on the guitar as an accompanying instrument, but treating it as a character that comes in as kind of a surprise. Tom can make the guitar sound wild – I really like that"

"One of my favorite films from Jim Jarmusch; I can never get enough of it. Beautifully shot by Robby Müller in Louisiana, a jailbreak with Tom Waits, John Lurie, and the first time many of us were to see the amazing Roberto Benigni. The Defiant Ones meets the Marx Brothers and even better. Jim is one of the last true stylists left in this “sad and beautiful world.”"