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.
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.
I'm kind of proud of that little record! I mean I've heard about a million other records that have come out since then by all these groups around here and there and I really like 'Little Johnny Jewel'.
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.
I'd never assume an audience was anything but totally receptive and perfect. Seriously, it seems to me that's the only circumstance you can work under. Otherwise, speaking for myself, you may as well be in the advertising business.
Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.
Well, I worked in a sheet metal factory once and scarred my wrist from the cuts. I found a sympathetic psychiatrist who told the draft board I was insane. We used the scars as proof of a suicide attempt.
Practice? I never practice. I just write songs and take solos.
Places like Belgium and the south of France, Sweden and Copenhagen are really alive. They really love rock 'n' roll, they really respond.
I told somebody in Europe I was 43. I never tell my true age. It's ridiculous that people ask. The press doesn't deserve anything but lies.
I'm not even sure who my audience is.
The first time I met Patti Smith was in a laundromat. We knew some of the same people, including Richard Hell.
You can't get so interested in just making sounds. The point of it all is some kind of expression.
I'm not a clown but I'm not an academic either.
I don't see us as a big media gimmick band. We don't have a cultivated appearance or anything like Kiss.
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.
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.
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!
I don't think Marquee Moon was so good, y'know? Just another record. First records everybody likes a lot.
I don't want any production credit. I think producers are overrated. They're for people who, first of all, don't know anything about music or arranging and have no ear for their own doings. They can't tell a good solo from a bad solo, stuff like that.
When somebody turned me on to a Coltrane record around seventh grade, I took up saxophone.