I must say that kids make it a lot harder process, especially having to live the life of a traveling recording artist.
I think I’ve done more recording in the past 10 years than most people, but it’s all been directed toward film composing and soundtracks. Just the same, it’s been great.
The thing that’s cool about the recording booth is that it’s so perfunctory, so cut-to-the-chase.
I’m no diva but I can be annoying in a recording studio. Of course I try to be a diva in terms of confidence of performance and owning a song but I’ve never behaved like one in terms of the negative connotations of the word.
I really don’t think records should be made in the manner where you sit and write, and when you’re finished writing, you start recording. That just seems conventional and old-fashioned to me.
The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear how uncomfortable I am with it, and how terrified I am with it.
I never thought I’d be able to say 25 years about anything, really, much less be a recording artist for 25 years.
As long as you’re recording and they pay the fee, it’s like a lottery ticket. You never stop trying.
I’ve been more and more into production lately, and I really, really love that. I love recording.
I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.
Like most things that happen with Sabbath, it happened all of a sudden. I was intending on doing some recording, but out of the blue, Sharon called up and said she wanted us to do these gigs with Ozzy. I said that if everybody else was up to it then I would love to do it.
The beauty of recording in L.A. is that most of the musicians that are on the record live here, so it was easy to get world class artists like Rick Braun to swing by and play a little trumpet, Everette Harp on sax, guitarist Paul Jackson.
We rarely write in the studio. Everything’s already completely arranged before we go in. That way, we can really focus on getting the recording right.
I’ve got a studio at home, and I’m always recording.
I didn’t really even think of recording under my own name for a long time. I thought, ‘I’ve got the rest of my life to do that.’
I’m glad I’m not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone’s tape recording what you say.
There’s a difference between me recording in Atlanta, where I’m in the midst of all my problems, and recording in L.A. or being on the road, where I can look back at things and have a different perspective. I do most of my writing while I’m away.
Back in the day, fans wrote letters to groups – you’d get them, although it could take a while. Now, artists can go online and there’s discussions about what you should and shouldn’t be doing. The minute you announce that you’re recording an album, thousands of people are telling you what that album should be.
When I first heard Wallace Stevens’ voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.
Duncan Aldrich has been my partner in most recording projects, and touring projects, for the past decade.
I now have a home recording studio, which I can operate entirely on my own, as well as a portable version of the same which allows me to record anywhere I like and simply swap out the hard drives for use in the home studio.
I still recall how nervous I was when I went for the recording of ‘Guzarish’… When I reached the studio, all of them were there – Rahman, Aamir Khan, lyricist Prasoon Joshi and director A.R. Murugadoss.
I think everyone knows that I’m always the one that’s the busiest in Maiden. When we’re not touring or recording, I’m still doing loads of Maiden stuff – video editing and god knows what else – so I get a lot less downtime than the others.
I was kind of thrown into – I didn’t expect to do this for a living, being a recording artist. I was just playing music for the fun of it and writing songs. That was kind of my escape, you know, from the humdrum of the world.
When I had my daughter, Louisanna, two and a half years ago, I started recording every funny or sweet thing she said or did on my phone.
You have to keep the recording process open. If you make too many decisions before you go in, you can lose out on those serendipitous moments that can really make a record, that I think are always required in the making of a really good record.
My music is the foundation of everything that I do, and my fans make it possible for me to keep recording.
Personal songs take a little more to record, definitely. We had to bring our souls into the recording studio. It was us being very vulnerable. We heard that our fans can kind of feel that.
At the time, the only options were playing the local county fair. Now with American Idol and younger recording artists that have come out, there is more of an opportunity.
By interviewing at least one veteran, you can preserve memories that otherwise might be lost. My uncle was a downed fighter pilot and P.O.W. in World War II, and I am looking forward to recording his story for inclusion in the project.
When it comes to the recording and writing, it’s still mostly Mickey and I. But now there’s this whole live entity that’s a whole different thing, and it seems to be where we’re gaining the most popularity.
There could be no filmmaking without industrywide agreement on frame rates, lenses, and audio recording equipment.
There are a lot of great recording artists, like Jack White and Jack Johnson, who stay confined inside a very small box, but I’m more like Bon Iver, who recorded an album with programmed drums, and the next record was totally organic. I get that.
One of my most persistent, long-term fantasy wishes is not that I could fly or become invisible, but that I could make sound recording be invented decades or even centuries earlier than it was, so I could hear what people in the 1830s or 1750s actually sounded like.
I don’t work out a lead section and practice it for a day and then lay it down. I don’t do that. The first time I do something I think is expressive or really cool, that’s what’s actually on the recording.
I am often asked what I would be doing if I hadn’t become a writer. I have long said I would probably be a chef or a garden designer or a decorator, but since recording my own books, there is no doubt in my mind that if the writing doesn’t work out, voice work is what I would choose.
The people I idolized I saw once a year on the Tony Awards. I would buy the cassette tapes of the various Broadway shows and scour the photos inside the recording package. That’s how I exposed myself to the arts – New York and professional theater felt like a very distant thing.
She’s been a smack addict, she’s had big success in Europe in the ’70s, and she’s lost everything. She’s been rediscovered in the ’80s, and as we meet her she’s just about to sign a new recording contract.
Whenever I can squeeze it in, I’m writing and recording.
My goal has always been to make classic records, classic albums. Sometimes the recording process and the era it was recorded in means the production leans in a particular way, but to me they are all part of the same process.
The recording sessions for ‘Noonday Dream’ were so varied and over quite a period of time.
I only think in the following terms: writing, recording, releasing. That’s what I have control of. What I don’t have control is whether critics or the public like what I do.
Jason Bourne is supposed to be really sneaky and spry, but as soon as he walks by, everybody pulls out their cell phones and starts recording. That level of fame is wild to see.
With the advent of radio and recording, music became an industry rather than just a tradition.
When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.
When I first started recording, I was told by all of the experts in the business that the kind of music that I was doing was never going to sell. That disco was the coming thing and it was going to take over and what I was interested in was a minor sideline.
For me, I’ve always been intimidated by the computer coming from the era of record industry and record stores and buying records and looking at album covers, waiting in line for records when they came out and then ultimately being successful in a band where we recording pre-computer era.
I know great songwriters. Fred Neil would come up when he was in L.A., we all used to hang out. He would sit there and sing, and we would just melt. I mean, we would go to his recording sessions.
All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.
Sheet music, recording, radio, television, cassettes, CD burners, and file sharing have all invalidated, to some extent, the old model of making a living making music.
While there used to be one or two Pops orchestras, now there are all kinds of European orchestras that suddenly look upon this as a golden wand that can enable them to make money recording this music.
