Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.
You’d be surprised. Drummers ape each other. The way every rock n’ roll record sounds like something else but not all together. Everything other drummers play, if you’re playing drums, they all hear.
My songs have a lot going on in them -they’re packed with sounds. When I have only three or four minutes to capture something, I guess I can’t stand the idea of any bar going unloved.
It sounds maybe a little old fashioned, but the parts I want to play and I do play, you don’t want to inject too much of your own personality. What you sacrifice then is a slight mystery.
It’s funny, I had dinner with my dear friend John Spencer last night and I’m not in the first episode, but he’s at the beginning of it and he was telling me about it and I thought this sounds very hot because I think this is definitely the last year of West Wing.
My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I’ve got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it’s possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.
Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.
I’m naturally shy, so the social media thing is new to me. I haven’t really figured out how my voice sounds on social media, you know? I don’t want to tweet everyday just for the sake of tweeting. I want to make sure whatever I do there is honest. Social media can very quickly get fake, and I don’t want to be that guy.
I know it sounds new age-y, but what I’ve truly come up with is that you really need to trust that you’re on your own path, as long as you stay true to it and you show up, which is 99% of it.
The human voice sounds thicker with a chorus and reverb than a dry signal.
Also in Norah Jones, now there’s a voice that sounds and I don’t mean disrespect but sounds a hundred years old that sounds incredibly experienced. It’s just an exciting time.
I think probably the scariest thing, as weird as it sounds, was ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and the flying monkeys with the witch. I remember seeing that – it still seems freaky.
A band like Depeche Mode would go out and record them hitting a trash can with a steel rod or something and recording it. And that would be one of their sounds of the drums. I love the creativeness of that kind of really raw sampling.
I was excited by the process of Pandora, which I still think is a decent product. Not as great in actuality as it sounds. After the first hour, its weaknesses start to show up.
There’s very little you’re not exposed to in New York City, in terms of ideas and physical things – sights, sounds, smells, different kinds of people. But one good thing about growing up fast is you get over it fast, too.
