In this issue. Earth, Wind And Fire’s Ralph Johnson, for instance, explains how their celebratory fusion of jazz, blues, gospel, soul, funk, R&B and disco carried a deeper purpose: “The idea was to lift up your fellow man by way of the music and the messages in the music. There was a higher calling.”
Or Tori Amos, who reveals how her rapturous songs are guided by her ever-present Muses. “It’s a calling,” “I’m a lioness, so I hunt for frequency and how to tell the story.”
Then, of course, there is our cover star, Tom Waits, for whom the transformative nature of music has been a guiding principle for five decades. “When you’re at one of his shows, you can tell there’s more going on than just a concert,” says Beck, a longstanding admirer. “There’s something theatrical, somewhere between Samuel Beckett and burlesque, with a carnivalesque invocation of the strange. He seemed to inhabit the spirit of some of these older forms of performing, but with a modern sense of the absurd.”
The Fat Angel Sings 