Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You know, I was such a big Beatles fan, and when I'd buy a new album I'd invariably hate it the first time I heard it 'cause it was a mixture of absolute joy and absolute frustration. I couldn't grasp what they'd done, and I'd hate myself for that.
I know I am old-fashioned, but I don't want to bring out a fashion line, I don't want to bring out an album. I just want to do the work as best as I can, and if that effects change for somebody, then that is great. I don't want to change the world.
Everyone always tells you about how amazing recording their first album was and how they'll always look back on the 'process' with fond memories. I will look back on it as an extremely stressful time that somehow also managed to be extremely boring.
I think the problem with the term graphic novel is it sounds pompous, it sounds pretentious, whereas on the continent, they call it an album, which to me sounds, it's got more much of a connotation of a kind of a music single and an album collection.
Well, 'Crunk Rock' doesn't mean rock. Initially when I started the album, I did collaborate with a bunch of rock musicians and producers. But as I started to have time to free my mind and catch different vibes, it started to mean something different.
We were in the same band, but we're two completely different people. People have asked me to make comparisons with our albums, and I can't, because there's no comparison. Her album's okay. I don't think she's the best singer on Earth, but she's okay.
I loved plays, I loved films, but I had no desire to act until I had just put out my album 'Like Water for Chocolate.' Creatively, I felt like I'd hit a ceiling, and I needed something else to express myself, and I just decided to take acting classes.
For me, 'Atmosphere' was more about looking inwards and reaching out to people close to me. To emphasize the fact that I'm singing on the first single, this album is really more about me and songs that I've written instead of collaborating with people.
It was just like a dream. I could have ended up with an album that's not all that different from anything else coming out of Nashville. Mutt made the difference. He took these songs, my attitude, my creativity, and colored them in a way that is unique.
I saw Mercury Prize-winners Alt-J for the first time recently, touring their debut album 'An Awesome Wave,' and I'm still riding the high: they're the most musically dynamic and exciting band to have poured tune into my lug holes live since Bellowhead.
It's a miracle was the last track recorded for the album, we based it on the rhythm from the middle of 'Late Home Tonight, where there's Graham Broad playing lots and lots of drums with me shouting in the background, pretending to be a mad Arab leader.
I wanted to write a book like a rapper would write it - I didn't want to hold back. Rappers catch a lot of slack; I'm not going to be cursing up a storm, but when I look at Nas... his first album is one of my favorites. I want to tell stories like that.
Then we did what we called basically I suppose a club tour in England, which was the time I think that our second album came out, we club toured around the whole country where the venues were hold to five hundreds upwards to that sort of thing you know.
She is always going to be Diana Ross; she doesn't have to put out another album to keep at it. I'm not Diana, but people know me from the stuff that I've done. And that stuff, those videos, live forever and will continue to be discovered by a new users.
Michael Giles the first drummer of King Crimson, never agreed to the name King Crimson. But then, if you'd knew Michael, you would know he didn't agree to the album cover either. So maybe Michael didn't agree to the point of definition with many things.
I was 14 when I decided I wanted to start doing music and stuff. I was a really big fan of Ben Howard, and he put out a really amazing album in 2014, and then, after being inspired by my dad and Lady Gaga and Ed Sheeran, I wanted to start writing songs.
George Carlin's album, 'Class Clown,' came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I'd come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don't even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.
I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah's 'Black Reign' is the album that stands out the most.
Our album stuff, we bring it to our producer to help us finesse. But anything that's been on YouTube and a lot of the stuff that's been on the album, too, it started from us just sitting around in a circle and jamming it and finding where the parts fit.
One thing I loved when I was growing up, you maybe saw one review from a magazine like 'Rolling Stone,' but now there are 150 reviews before an album even comes out. There are so many opinions out there, but the only one that really matters is your own.
I'm just experimenting with every different type of music you can imagine and seeing where my voice lies and what sounds best. I think when I do finally do the album it will be very eclectic - just loads of different stuff on it. That's what I am hoping.
It's gonna sound so boring to most people. There have been times when I've been told, 'Oh, you're doing an album about physics? I hope it's not boring.' They don't get the idea. Because rappers are so one-dimensional, so narrow-minded, it comes off corny.
I think when we were making the first album, we were like 16, 17 years old, and I think just years and years of recording and playing shows - I know me, personally, I kind of figured out my style more and vocally learned a better way to sing in the studio.
I'm narrating the television series Biography. I'm still involved in my music - I have a new album out. I have an animated project in development. I'm writing a lot of things and you never know if one of them is going to become a six or seven year project.
To actually put the time and energy into an album that would be better than Pull would be a hell of a lot of work, because I took that band really seriously, way more seriously than people took us. If you go back and listen to the records, you can hear it.
In my early 20s, there was a period when all I owned was about a dozen CDs and a crappy Discman. I'd listen to 'The Man Who Sold The World' album endlessly as I sat on off-peak trains jerking around the Sussex countryside to and from the asylum I worked in.
As long as Elton John can bring forth one performance per album on the order of 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight,' the chance remains that he will become something more than the great entertainer he already is and go on to make a lasting contribution to rock.
I have always been infatuated with country music. Country music tells stories, and I've always loved to tell stories. I said that when I establish myself as an artist that can do pretty much anything I want to do in music, I'm going to make a country album.
I've done two albums for Concord Records; one was with Al Jarreau and it did very well for us. The second album was called 'Songs And Stories,' and it had good songs and good performances, but I promised them I would do an album that was more jazz-oriented.
I remember when our first album came out. After one of our gigs, we went across the border to Mexico and the band in the bar where we were was doing covers of our songs. I don't think they understood a word they were singing but they did the songs perfectly.
I hear an album so many times during the course of making it that when I've just finished it, I don't want to hear it again. After you've taken a little bit of time away from it, you can come back to it, which can be scary. I'm happy with 'Sonik Kicks,' man.
The first year with the success that we had and let me point out that the time frame changes depending on which decade you look at it. In the seventies acts were kind of expected to do an album a year. If you look at the Beatles they were doing three a year.
I think I've grown a lot in the last few years, and I needed to express myself as an artist on this. It wasn't necessarily about going in and making an album chocked full of hit singles... there were a lot of things I did out of the joy and the want to do it.
I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album.
No, I will never do another Rainbow album. I'll never ever do that again. I want no part in doing it; I want no part in doing anything with Ritchie at all. I respect him. He's a genius. He was a great part of my life, but I don't need to go through that hell.
I think I got turned onto The Beach Boys for the first time with the 'Endless Summer' album in 1974. The power of that music still, to this day, bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. You don't have to think about it; it's something that you feel.
I just always want a new producer. I'm going to have a new producer on the next one. Because I'm the same person, and I feel like, I know I'm going to bring to it a certain sensibility that's me, and I want to have something different coming out on each album.
All the time I was writing hit songs with my partner David Porter, I always had the yen to perform. Sure did. And when the opportunity came, I took it. The first album, 'Presenting Isaac Hayes,' didn't do so hot, but it was like a prelude for what was to come.
In the studio, if things go wrong, you stop things and fix them. I have never been in a recording studio, really, where the people in the booth were not interested in making a very good album. It's often a light-hearted atmosphere but serious at the same time.
I think up until the 'Honestly' album it was very much label-company lead, of 'this is a sound that we need, this is what you need to do. You need to do ballads, you need to do a million different types of love songs,' and I hate ballads and I hate love songs.
I wanna record these girls individually. And then, I wanna cut a blues album on me. But all of it, original stuff, you know. When I listen to the blues today, it's like they all sounds similar. I wanna do something different, to try to add to the blues flavor.
'Soulfire' is a collection of stuff I've done in the past. Each song is an element of who I am: There's a doo-wop song on the album; a blues song, R&B and some jazz. For people who are going to be hearing me for the first time, it's an introduction to who I am.
At the end of the day, it is about the album and book and also about setting the record straight, because 'American Idol' has done a great job of defaming my name and throwing a lot of mud at me for the past two years. So that set up a lot of roadblocks for me.
I wanted something that had the feel of a complete band and a variety of instrument. Apart from doing the album for musical satisfaction, I felt it was an important statement for other women - showing you don't have to rely on other people to do things for you.
I got to live out my 11-year-old fantasies - I got to go on stage with Green Day. Billie Joe called my name from the stage. 'Dookie' was the first album I ever bought. I covered the whole of 'Nimrod' and he'd heard it. That was like the 11-year-old girl dreamed.
My first album, 'Get Lifted,' was a hip-hop soul album that had some of its roots in the church, as far as the sonic choices, in the way that I sing and write songs. I have always had that as part of my background and part of my influence when I am making music.
I now possess the tools as a producer and a songwriter to really just go out and make smashes all day long. I could make an album full of smash records that got pop appeal. But my heart is in hip-hop. My heart is in telling stories. And it's like therapy for me.
I have come to the conclusion - and I don't know why it took me so long, but nevertheless, I'm here now - that a lot of people tell me they don't get enough guitar on my albums. So I decided to do an album where the guitar would be the singer, playing the melody.
You make your first album, you make some money, and you feel like you still have to show face, like 'I still go to the projects.' I'm like, why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it's so cool?
I wanted to make good records. But my problem is I've got a low boredom threshold, so I wanted it to look and sound different with each album, which is really tantamount to suicide, cause people lose it, they lose it - they say: 'I like that, and that's not this.'