When I listen to a band like Pink Floyd, I don’t know the names of the individual songs, I know the full albums. That’s what we want for our albums.
I spent summers in my room listening to cast albums, like ‘Les Miserables,’ every night. I knew it backwards and forwards. I want to be the first black Jean Valjean.
With the first two albums and with my social media, I’ve always been very open about who I am.
To compare the albums is like trying to compare apples and oranges.
When you make albums like I do, and it’s based off fanfare and based off touring – I make these albums, and I get on the road. It’s not really a radio-driven thing. I get on the road, and I see my fans, and I touch each and every last one of them.
I don’t think that a lot of my favorite producers or bands would produce our albums or even play on them, unfortunately.
That’s what I do: I drop albums, and I just keep it moving.
When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound – Joy Division’s ‘Closer,’ or Echo and the Bunnymen’s ‘Heaven Up Here’… I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life.
‘Lucky Us’ ends with a description of a photograph of the novel’s fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums.
It’s fun to take songs from a completely different context and reframe them. We did two mixtape albums called ‘Other People’s Heartache’ and ‘Other People’s Heartache Pt. 2,’ which were full of those kind of covers and mash-ups, mixed with film music and film quotes.
For five albums, I would create an image of someone that wasn’t true to who they were. I’d be in love with an idea. It’s not an uncommon problem.
Comedy lives on in the web and TV, but nobody’s pressing comedy albums anymore.
When I was 20, 21 years old, I had just got married. Put yourself in my wife’s shoes. All of these fans all across the world would have Donny Osmond burning – record-burning parties. They would put my albums and burn them.
Someone at Hollywood Records said, ‘Are you into Alanis Morissette?’ I said ‘Yeah, she sells 26 million albums, of course. It would be perverse if she works with me, but I don’t think you can get her.’ A week later they say she’s coming down the studio.
When I’m done with something, I’m done. I don’t go back and listen to and pine for my old albums, or the Lollapalooza days, or ‘Psalm 69’ selling millions of records. Maybe I’m really just getting old and mellow.
Probably because the first two albums were so successful, we got a little bit smug.
It’s frustrating to do albums that you think are worth listening to, but it’s just so difficult to cut through.
The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased.
The early ELP albums were pioneering in a way.
All of the Doors’ albums are great. I could go on and on about everything that band did. ‘L.A. Woman’ is phenomenal. But I have to say, ‘Strange Days’ is it for me. That’s the one I always gotta listen to.
My albums really are like scrapbooks to me.
As a Latin musician, I understand that there are so many places where people don’t know who I am. My albums never came out in Australia or Japan.
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.
Those albums are so important to me because, for the first time, I was making my own music, paying for it, finding strengths in it, and going through the process of finding the right music for the record.
‘Ten’ by Pearl Jam is still by far one of my favorite albums and is a big part of what inspired me to learn guitar.
Rocknroll is a selfish business because youre always thinking about the tour, the show, promotion and writing new albums. Your head is somewhere else, but Ive learnt to not let it be all-consuming. You want time with your family.
When I began making my own albums, the songs became funkier. They were more about the streets.
My goals have changed throughout my life. At one time it was winning awards, selling out concert dates, selling more albums than anyone else. Now, my goals are to see my grandchildren grown, live a long and healthy life with my family and friends and travel the world.
Growing up I really loved Mazzy Star, The Cranberries, Fiona Apple, Everything But The Girl. I listened to a lot of really random things too that I would find by myself. I would find Minnie Riperton albums that I would fall in love with, also, a lot of old country records.
My dad is a guitar player with huge vinyl record collection. I loved listening to his albums, especially Cream and The Yardbirds.
‘Rock n’ Roll Animal,’ the live album, is one of the greatest live albums out there. It was a huge influence on me.
I’ll be a nun, raise my daughter, and make albums.
In the beginning, if you look at those early label albums of the Chicks, we didn’t write all that much. We had an A&R person and they were getting songs from publishers, listening to hours and hours of cassette tapes.
There is something about live albums that I enjoy so much more than studio albums from all of my favorite artists. When I am listening to them live, I get to connect so much more to their truth than in studio albums.
To be honest, making albums is really never easy. It’s always a bit excruciating because there’s always this fight to make it great, and then you hit these stumbling blocks along the way.
What I appreciate about Radiohead’s work – and it’s most evident in ‘Hail to the Thief’ – is how the juxtaposition of narratives on the band’s albums somehow creates a sense of wholeness.
I listened to all the Misfits albums growing up and Red Hot Chili Peppers, too.
I always think of albums as the format. I think it’s perfect. I don’t think you can tamper with that. It’s not just sound, the analog, which is so much richer. It’s the format. You’re constrained by just 45 minutes, and it’s perfect to me. I don’t want to listen to any more than, and I live and breathe music.
My thing was, I loved music. I played music: I played the saxophone. So the little bit of music knowhow I had, I tried to implement that in every thing I did, from my style, my cadence, the way I tried to pause and stagnate it; that all came from John Coltrane and listening to jazz albums. Trying to rhyme like a jazz player.
I’m a big fan of other guitar players, Duane Allman and tons of them, but I don’t really love totally guitar-specific albums.
My first two albums, ‘Silverbird and ‘Just a Boy,’ which had the single ‘Long Tall Glasses’ on it, were very well received. Then I did another one, ‘Another Year,’ which did miserably.
I think that’s what most of us rappers do too often. We put too much information in some of our albums that could actually be on the next ones.
There were a number of false starts where I was trying to make solo albums. They would get constantly folded into group efforts. In retrospect, I can say fair enough, that you call yourself a band member, and you’ve got to step up to the plate when the need arises.
We get notes sent to us backstage from college students that say, ‘My parents used to play your albums all the time! I grew up with you, and I love the new stuff.’
I liked comedy as a kid. When I was a kid, I’d go to sleep to, like, Bill Cosby albums every night. I’d listen to ‘Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow… Right!’ and ‘Wonderfulness,’ which are two of his most famous albums. Then the next night, I’d flip them over, ’cause it was the old stackable turntable.
I’m gon’ drip forever, but I’m not going to just focus on that. That’s not going to be the title of all my albums.
I did ‘Love Letter’ and ‘Write Me Back,’ and those were fun albums for me to do because they took me back to music I love.
What really helps me is being able to record my albums at home – I have more fun experimenting that way, as opposed to working with an engineer, in which case I have to deal with the humiliation of doing take after take, and that can get frustrating.
All my albums are evolutions, one on top of the other.
First of all, I’ve been having a wonderful run of luck with cover albums, songs I didn’t write. I had five pop cover albums and two Christmas albums, and they were all very successful.
Well, since I produce and pay for my own albums, it is the ultimate freedom.
Where I’m fortunate and why I think I’ve thrived and survived, through the not having albums out every year-and-a-half, is not taking the songs lightly and trying to make sure I’ve got consistency.
I don’t do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less. If it sells one, it sells one.
The way to judge a new artist is by listening to their albums and gauging the progress that they make from the first record to the next one.
If I could make albums quicker, I’d be on a roll wouldn’t I? Everything just seems to take so much time. I don’t know why. Time… evaporates.
I wanted to make something that reminded people of the way albums used to feel. I wanted something as good as the stuff put out by the Bomb Squad, or Dr. Dre and his production crew, or ‘A Tribe Called Quest.’ I miss albums like those.
