I had a recording contract with Capitol Records. I loved recording and being in that studio. I made four albums.
The Too Short albums are not the autobiography of Todd Shaw.
When I want to check out how my life’s been, I go through my albums. They steps in my life.
I come from a time when pop music was the coin of the cultural realm and in a certain way was the only coin of the realm; movies didn’t matter as much, and not TV – it was all about pop music. In the era when I started – which was the early ’60s – it was all about singles leading to albums.
The album is always definitely the goal, because I think that albums are like captures and bookmarks. After five or six of them, you can always go back and be like, ‘Well, what was his first?’… I think an album really gives you a chance to make people feel something.
My music library is all over the place. I’ve got A$AP Rocky; I’ve got Billy Joel. I’ve got, like, Celine Dion albums that I just worship. There’s all kinds of different stuff.
It’s trippy to think we have an album that’s 10 years old. It’s even trippier to think we have a couple of albums older than that.
Deeper’ feels like we did when we made the first few albums. It’s got that excitement. It felt like a voyage of discovery.
I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.
He has given me several blockbuster albums in all these years, and DSP is the man behind many of the best songs in my career.
I don’t try to be difficult. I just care so much about these albums that I get crazed sometimes when I’m making them.
When you have a reputation for making not only good songs but great albums, that in itself creates added artistic pressure. But, at the end of the day, I guess that pressure is something I welcome.
Favored Nations is a long-term commitment. Our hope is that those who are passionate about real musicianship will want to hear and own most of our albums. We will set out to attain the same direct relationship with our customers that we have with our artists.
I not only composed music for my albums but also for the film ‘Main, Meri Patni Aur Woh.’
My first album, ‘Englaborn,’ was based on music originally written for the theatre. My solo albums, like ‘IBM 1401, a User’s Manual’ and ‘Fordlandia,’ have also had narratives attached to them.
My dad still hasn’t heard ‘I Love My Dad,’ and I’m sure he’ll say something like, ‘It’s good, but I love your version of ‘Little Drummer Boy’!’ My dad loves my live albums – he’s obsessed with the live version of ‘Little Drummer Boy’ for some reason.
I can’t do anything I want to. I mean, I can’t have my own TV show. I can’t have my own movie. But within my little world, nobody tells me what to put on the albums.
I listen to classic albums that I ain’t gotta fast forward. If I gotta fast forward it three times, I don’t like your music. Well, not your music, not your album. Yeah, I don’t like your album.
I made many studio albums and I think the danger of studio recording is that if you do not watch out, you come out with a perfectly sterile performance.
I was raised on jazz. My father, from the time I was born, used to get up early on Saturdays and Sundays and put on Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Kenny Burrell, Sarah Vaughn, John Coltrane – all these great, classic albums.
For people who love Tribe, I’m the defector. They say, ‘You should get back with Ali to do the beats.’ But a lot of people don’t realize I did all the music in Tribe. In the first three albums, I did all the beats!
Who cares about how many albums you’ve sold when you have sold out arenas and you’re making money?
I don’t listen to the albums that I make, and I don’t listen to a lot of music as a whole.
When I was younger, I listened to the greats: Winters, Mel and Carl, Nichols and May, Pryor, Carlin, Klein, Berman and lots of Lenny Bruce albums. But once I started doing fairly well, I didn’t want to hear anybody’s jokes or premises.
It used to be that labels would spend two or three or four albums developing a new artist before they threw in the towel and moved on, which kind of gave the artist an opportunity to grow.
I’ve had about 140 albums released, and I’ve done everything I wanted to do.
After giving countless hit songs, I felt saturated. I decided to do music only for my own films and music albums. And so, I decided to start my own music label.
On the first two albums, I essentially began with lyrics and placed the music underneath or around the words.
I get really frustrated – actually, it almost makes me angry – when I see, sometimes, magazines will publish a musician’s playlist. They’ll go and they’ll ask, I don’t know, somebody from Aerosmith or whoever, Coldplay, to list their five favourite albums. And it’s always the same stuff!
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.
I ended up writing songs and growing up in public with my songwriting. And it’s a good thing for me back then: in the early ’70s, there was a thing called artist development, where an artist could find his feet, find himself, find his voice. I think I made five or six albums before I sold five or six albums.
That was the producer who produced a couple of my solo albums. He produced my second, third and fourth solo albums. It was his project and I just joined him on it. I sang on one and played bass on another one.
Dream Theater music, there’s a lot of background and context to the songs, as far as the subject matter and the albums they come from.
I had all the Bill Cosby albums. ‘To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With’ – I knew every word.
I get letters from young people telling me that they’re broke and download my albums for free. They ask me what I think about that. I now have a standard line. I tell them, ‘I would rather be heard than paid.’
Music is my main goal, but I’m not going to rush a record out. There are so many actors who have come out with albums these days. I don’t want to do it because it’s the thing to do. I want to wait until the time is right.
My dad was a professional musician; my mom played, too, but just for fun. All my siblings played. The house was full of music books, videos, albums. I guess it’s not surprising that I ended up becoming a musician.
My favorite albums are really short.
All my first albums, they’re full of heart and emotion, and the songs are wonderful, but they wouldn’t have been the takes I would have chosen.
I’ve been here all the time; I could be putting out as many albums as Costello, y’know what I mean?
I had opera training for three years, and I have three albums out. I also did a Broadway show. I’m an actor that sings, so it is in my blood. It is in my system.
There’s 40 or 50 songs that nobody’s heard that I’ve done in between albums. There’s a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that’s never been released.
One of the important things when you’re making a record or doing a performance is the sequence of the songs. It really matters a lot because you want your project, your show, or your albums to sort of have a life.
I was on the school bus telling Richard Pryor jokes. I was sneaking, listening to Richard Pryor albums and would go to school the next day, tell all the jokes, and get in trouble because I was cursing.
The pirating thing is bad. The people it hurts the most are the ones you least think it hurts. It’s not the big Britney Spears albums that are being pirated; it’s the indie bands that don’t have two cents to their name.
Well, Smoke n’ Mirrors has very much a world music flavor and it doesn’t park itself in one country. It borrows heavily from the Brazilian angle, which is dear to my heart, and I recorded several albums with that flavor.
‘Summer Babe’ is the start of Pavement front-loading their albums with the catchiest song first.
As a rapper, I was heavily influenced by American rap albums. But for songs that are more melody-driven, I get my inspiration from Korean albums.
I wanna be the most successful socially aware artist: Grammys, number one singles, albums, overseas and internationally-known household name, all that.
Nobody really produces my albums.
I make sure the best of what I do each year is the only material that gets on my albums; I don’t want people to think I put out junk.
I occasionally rapped along to some homegrown Korean rap. And then a friend introduced me to Wu-Tang and played me ‘Enter the 36th Chambers.’ It was very shocking. And then I started to look for different albums. This was pre-Internet, so it’s hard to find the music, and it was even harder to find music videos.
I don’t think anybody does contemporary R&B albums better than me.
Most of the albums that have taken long have been related to illness and fatigue or producer problems.
Sometimes albums can be quick, sometimes they take forever, and we’re very good at taking forever.
In ’88, ’89, ’90, ’91… When I was making these albums, it would be four or five songs that didn’t have any curse words, that were about social issues in the community.
I think the best rappers practice concept albums in their work.
‘What’s Going On’ is one of the greatest albums ever made. I definitely wasn’t aiming to make my ‘What’s Going On,’ you know what I mean? That album is definitely deep in my DNA. I’ve probably listened to that more than maybe any other album ever in my entire life.
