When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music.
When people are recording, and they’re like, ‘I want to get the drum sound of the Beatles,’ I hate that.
It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.
I always kind of think if The Beatles were still around now, people would’ve lost interest quite a long time ago. Seven years of recording – it’s there forever. I think not outstaying your welcome is a vital ingredient.
Trying to get my music performed live by bar bands was a self defeating experience. It really just distracted me from what I should’ve been doing all along, writing and recording.
I’m extremely proud I was born and raised in the Bay Area and loved representing Oakland. I started recording in the Bay Area and worked with a lot of different producers. But I always wanted to collaborate with different writers and get different perspectives.
I am taking a break, but not a huge break because the Maiden record is actually happening right now, and I am recording it as we speak, well not right as we speak, but close.
In preparing for my recording audition, my mom told me to YouTube the old ‘Peanuts’ Thanksgiving and Christmas specials to hear how Charlie Brown speaks. So I listened to as much as I could find online to get the voice right. Winning the role took a lot of hard work, but good fortune as well.
The same way you can see me sit at a table in a movie and be six different people, the mother and the uncle and all these different things, when I’m in the studio, I can do that, too. I’m not trying to be a recording artist and have a certain type of music for the radio.
I love recording and I love everything – videos, everything like that – but playing live is what does it for me.
You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it.
I remember recording with Johnny Sandlin at his place right outside Muscle Shoals and he turned me on to a lot of those musicians at an early age, like Roger Hawkins and David Hood and just a ton of great players.
I think it was, my parents got me a karaoke machine when I was about 9 years old. Even before that, they got me a tape recorder that I used to walk around my life with. And there was something about recording and then hearing myself back.
I started off as a recording engineer and a beatmaker. I was this skater kid that would skateboard to auditions, and then I would use the money I’d make and buy a bunch of equipment and make a bunch of beats. I still am that kid, just with a little more money.
I’ve been recording since 1993. It was a hobby for six of those years. In 1999, I decided to do it full time and take it seriously.
When I was a kid, I wanted to emulate Mel Blanc, who is arguably one of the most legendary voiceover recording artists of our time. I used to watch all the cartoons where he would voice Daffy, Elmer Fudd and Porky the Pig. I knew one day I wanted to do that.
Any aspect of life can help you be a better actor because what are we doing except living life while somebody’s recording it?
I joined my father for recordings when I was 11 or so. By then, I could play a dozen instruments. My first professional recording was around that time. I played the vibraphone for Shankar-Ganesh in a Tamil film.
I started recording because I was always complaining about the records that I was getting of my songs. At least if I did them and messed them up, I wouldn’t have anyone else to blame.
Recording and touring are totally separate universes for me and it’s strange and refreshing when they invade each other momentarily.
I started writing out all of my feelings, and people asked me, ‘Have you ever thought of recording your music?’ It was something I’d always thought of, but I’d never really had the confidence.
I guess some of today’s programming has rubbed off on me because I find myself having to set time around for touring, putting that together and then setting time around for recording.
Every camera shoots horizontal, right? So we’re all super used to framing things with lots of horizontal room. We’ve seen this new wave of Snapchat stories and Instagram stories where people are actually framing for and recording in vertical. Whether it’s better or not is debatable.
I had a project called ‘Cover Art,’ which was the first project I did under the new name Anderson .Paak. I went through this process where I was recording new music for about six months straight.
I’m a multi-platinum recording artist; my passion is food.
I think it goes back to me being a recording mixer and engineer. Because of all the technology now you can make music yourself and a lot of people are doing that now. I started out doing that a long time ago and I found when I did that I came up with a unique sound.
You can see how different artists work, from writing to recording, just from being in the studio environment with them.
Sometimes I think elements of ‘Open Eye Signal’ are better live. I do this really crazy stuff at the end, but I don’t know if it’d translate well into recording. It would probably sound a bit too extreme.
The first Broadway show I ever heard was the recording of Carousel, and it was a very vivid experience.
What we’re increasingly seeing is comics are becoming better known across the world. They’re recording shows wherever they are, then putting them online for everyone. It has definitely changed in that way.
There are some movie stars in Hollywood that are so scared, they also tell the reporter that they are recording them, in case there is something wrong with what they wrote about them in the papers.
In this day and age, though, no matter how many people you play for, if you’re playing with a band like Blink, millions of people will see it thanks to YouTube and everything recording it.
When you work this intensely on something, the recording process becomes a bit like cabin fever. I shut everything out and, for a while, I totally lost perspective. To an outsider, I imagine the whole recording process sounds like torture.
We had a simple 8-track studio set up in the record store where I worked. And just staying after work and experimenting, realizing what was possible with recording – that’s why my project was called The Microphones at first. Because it wasn’t even songs really. It was just sound.
Everyone always tells you about how amazing recording their first album was and how they’ll always look back on the ‘process’ with fond memories. I will look back on it as an extremely stressful time that somehow also managed to be extremely boring.
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.
Everyone has a black guy inside them. Mine is a Cuban sonero who is 80-something years old and sings better than I do. His name is Medoro Madera. Medoro has been recording since 1997.
Why I got into music was James Taylor, so to see him be a real down-to-earth guy that’s unbelievably talented… then to hear him sing those lyrics of ‘What I’m Thankful For,’ which is a song Ms. Yearwood and I got to write together, that was definitely a highlight of my recording life.
The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
I like golden-era hip-hop because they were recording on a 2-inch tape. There was dirty, raw sampling. It’s nasty. It has a vibe to it.
Every time I listen back to solos of mine I’ll hear something I like and then another phrase that I can’t stand. You have to live with what you play. And the recording medium puts that on us. When I play live gigs I don’t think so much like that.
I’m involved with Recording Artists and Actors Against Drunk Driving. I’m also involved with most children’s causes, because children can’t help the environment they’re in.
I worked a long time to get good at what I’m doing, and nobody handed me a recording contract because of who my father is.
In 2006 or something, I was recording the voices for this short, ‘The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti.’ I was having fun doing these really crappy Doc Brown and Marty McFly impressions. During the middle of a line, a burp came out naturally. It was just so funny and gross.
The White House tapes, recording Nixon’s nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress.
Like for ‘Black Nails,’ I just had black nails – and I never have black nails. It was my first and last time getting black nails. And that’s so not normal for me. So when you’re recording, you’re up at the mic and you gotta name the file, so I just look down and I’m like, ‘Black Nails!’ That’s literally what it was.
I just want to make that my life: recording music and trying to write a good song every day.
I think, actually, I was the first person to ever sign a simultaneous video and recording deal with a record company.
