Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like to consider myself an all-rounder, and I'm not trying to be King of the Scene or anything. I'd like to do everything, from writing film scores to producing pop albums.
I had always loved comedy, and acted out Steve Martin and Bill Cosby albums with my sister for my parents on road trips and stuff, and I loved to laugh and make people laugh.
I produced her first album, and I was breaking up with her at the time. That was not comfortable. Falling in love with Joni Mitchell is a bit like falling into a cement mixer!
I always try to give my own albums space in between so I have time to create a new sound and give time for people to miss me. You have to come out fresh and reinvent yourself.
The Raspberries had recorded some ballads on every one of our albums, but after 'Go All The Way' was successful Capital pretty much wanted to hear nothing but 'Go All The Way.'
As a teen, I heard the second Velvet Underground album, 'White Light/White Heat,' and it was too much for my limited scope of appreciation. It was intense, but I didn't get it.
Look. I was a superhero in the '90s. I said so at the time. McCartney, Weller, Townshend, Richards, my first album's better than all their first albums. Even they'd admit that.
There's plenty for me to do. There are more albums. I'll record as long as I can and as long as my voice works as well as it does now and for as long as people want to hear me.
But I always held my music up and protected it from compromise. So I just do it for my friends. I've written hundreds of songs, and I'm sure I have a few albums worth of songs.
And, he'd seen me in Panama, and he talked about maybe doing something in New York so I hooked it up when I came here and I recorded in 1969 my first album with Pete Rodriguez.
I don't want the big flashing lights and red carpet, like, "Here comes another Bon Iver album!" I just want it to be my bedroom-y thing. But that'll take a while to figure out.
In those days it was pretty cut and dry. If you had a record company believing in you enough to cut an album then you had better have the ability to work the album on the road.
The melody is French. But that's the end of the record. I named it "Jean Pierre Then There Were None," you know, because of the big explosion. You'll like it. It's a nice album.
For the second album I look forward to doing a lot of serious collaboration and taking the experiences I've had over this last year, good and bad, and working it into the album.
I've worked with a lot of different producers, a lot of different writers on the album, so I mostly feel like I learned a lot about what I don't want to do the next time around.
The success of this album is very much in question. Who knows where it's going to go? My being a Spice Girl is no guarantee of anything, although I hope it'll benefit the sales.
I was going through some emotional turmoil. You can tell by the tunes on the album that I was going through a break-up of my marriage. It was the only way I could express myself.
Raoul' sold a respectable 700,000 copies without a hit single. It didn't take off. If you don't sell 8 million albums or 4 million albums again, everybody deems it a big failure.
One of my favorite albums is Bob Gibson and Bob Camp, 'At the Gate of Horn.' It was a really dynamic album, almost like The Beatles, and way before its time... around 1960 or so.
But we're still rehearsing and planning to make a new album next year. We have some really good new songs that we've already been playing on that last tour that we just finished.
Between the record companies being the way they are and the fact that people can just download one song instead of buying a whole album, it's hard to make a good living nowadays.
I gave the album [You're Under Arrest] to Quincy Jones and he loved "D Train". We couldn't call it "D Train"; it's called "MDI/Something's On Your Mind/MD2". That's on the album.
I guess the idea of doing albums in their entirety, in sequence, appeals to people. I guess it's the memory of being able to hear the music in the way it was originally presented.
I see songs not as a commodity used up when the album goes off the charts, which is often the case with pop songs. I see them as a body of work. Life should be breathed into them.
The Beginning of Survival is my best album. I am very proud of it, and I am surprised at it, too. I thought some of Travelogue was a little heavy, but I don't think this is heavy.
I don't care at all about the mainstream; I don't care about popularity contests; I don't care about who's got the biggest-selling album; and I don't care about glossy production.
My mother kept asking me, "When are you going to do a gospel album?" And I've always wanted to do a gospel album. Everybody was going on about it, so mom started hounding me more.
Hip-hop's always reached out to kids. If you look at the last 10 big albums it might seem ironic. But when I look at the history of this music it's always had a lot of positivity.
Albums aren't even selling anymore and there's a reason for that. Record companies are just signing single and ring tone deals and it doesn't seem like they're focusing on albums.
Nothing is more frustrating to me than putting a song on an album and regret putting it on there. I'm excited that there are no songs on 'Tailgates & Tanlines' that I'm iffy about.
I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What's the point?
When young groups put out albums, they're always forced to go through this cycle of touring and talking and flaunting and posturing and peacocking. Nobody makes me do that anymore.
I don't like to listen to my older albums. They frighten me. I can't explain it. It's so subjective. It's so personal. I cannot listen to my first album, ever. Never, never, never.
When I hit my 20s, I took a chill pill and relaxed because throughout my teens I was churning out an album a year. It was a treadmill of work then recording, promoting and touring.
Most of the time I like to start an album abroad, not at home, just to avoid the pressure, to not wake up and think, OK, its the first of recording this album. I like to avoid that.
Once I got into punk rock, I started mail-ordering albums, because a lot of the record stores in my area didn't carry the punk bands from England or Sweden or Chicago or Los Angeles
One of my favorite songs from the album is a song called 'For Better or Worse,' and it's basically about unconditional love, which is, I'd say, an ongoing theme in my personal life.
In a way, as much as we love to be a big, loud rock band, the acoustic album was a lot easier to make than the rock records. I think because it was brand new territory for the band.
I think it all started with Nina Simone. When I was maybe seven or eight, I used to listen to one of her albums every night before I went to sleep. For me, her voice was everything.
I've made music for grownups most of my life as a singer/songwriter - often with my band, Nine Stories - recorded many albums, and 10 years ago I started recording kid's music, too.
If you take your last album & try to copy it, then thats sure to hell the way to stagnation. And that makes me bored...and if I'm bored then the music is boring and so are the band!
When you're in a band, you're all in it together. You're always available. You're always available for the albums; you're always available for the tours. There's no question of that.
You can't ask someone who is not making that kind of money to go to the record store and buy an album when someone down the street has the same record with same sound quality for $5.
Most bands don't make it past two albums and tours, if that. We pulled it off, and everybody's been happy and cool, but we got to the point where we knew it was time to take a break.
Avril Lavigne sold a massive amount of albums and she has to top that with her next release. We have four great albums behind us, and it's not going to be as hard to live up to that.
What I've heard from younger women and women my age is that the albums changed their lives or it was the first time they had heard feminism that they could relate to. So that's great.
It's such a normal thing for a dance producer to make music and try it out in the club, but that was relatively new to me. I wanted to make a good album that felt like it had a point.
I'm Here All Weak might be the strangest comedy album I have ever heard. But I've listened twice, which is more than I listen to 90 percent of all comedy albums, so I think I love it?
With albums like 'Rodeo,' 'Days Before Rodeo' and 'Owl Pharaoh,' I was really tuned into wanting to get people to understand my conscious and who I was mentally and who I am mentally.
But I'm always trying to plan ahead too and in doing so, and in working on this album, I've met a lot people that I hope to be involved with, on their records and in their situations.