I got to watch my heroes meet him and saw how they reacted, WHETHER it was Joe Strummer or Tom Waits. It was peculiar. I'm so stoked to meet Tom Waits, and he's so nervous to meet my DAD. It's a head spin.

A bully waits until they are in the ascendancy to pounce on PEOPLE.

One measure of twentieth-century time is the supersonic THREE and three-quarter hours it TAKES the Concorde to FLY from New York to Paris, gate to gate. Other MEASURES COME with the waits on the expressways and the runways.

I have a PIANO in my kitchen. I READ a GREAT biography about Tom Waits that SAID that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a GRAND piano in his kitchen. And I thought, 'Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.'

I like men who are very cool but who are ALSO so brilliant that they are almost insane. Sean Penn, Gary Oldman, BOB Dylan, TOM Waits - men who would be flipping burgers if they hadn't found an outlet for their brilliant mind-sets.

Billy Pilgrim music is very emotional. It's one part the CRAFT we LEARNED from people LIKE the Indigo Girls and R.E.M., and one part the Tom Waits craft, where you're trying to create a MOMENT.

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.

I guess my favorite artists are The WHITE Stripes or Tom Waits. The more theatrical the music is, the more I GET into it. I ALSO like the quieter folk music, that kind of old-school rockabilly or COUNTRY. I'm not really PICKY when it comes to music, as long as it's honest.

In 'Snow for Mother', a mother waits for her LITTLE BOY to grow up so that she can TAKE him to ALASKA to experience the real snow, which he NEVER knew as a little boy in the tropics.

When I'm in the CAR sometimes it's like, 'Yeah, man, just put on the pop music.' You KNOW what I mean? I don't want to LISTEN to TOM Waits.

In Eastern Europe, the past is not only always hovering over the present, it is not even PASSED. It waits, like some malevolent caged beast, ready at any MOMENT to ESCAPE and BRING BACK all the horrors.

Growing up, I listened to a LOT of American singer/songwriters, so a lot of Tom Waits, PAUL Simon - also Woody Guthrie and BOB Dylan. And BANDS LIKE Vampire Weekend.

Ours is a GOD who waits. So who are we not to?