He is not in the least arrogant. The last album was written in a room in Sussex. He was like a mad professor, spending all day writing and then coming out with brilliant tunes.
If I cut an album now and sell it for ten bucks, I can put seven dollars and fifty cents in my pocket.
Well, when you’re recording an album, artists have what they feel like is good music, and the label, they’re trying to sell the album. So those two ideas clash sometimes, but in the end it always works out. When you put the two together, that’s a good thing.
I really can’t blame anyone but myself, because I didn’t have to deliver the album. But when you get caught up in the gas, and you’re young, and there’s so much helium going on around you, you can’t decipher the real end.
I miss CDs. I miss listening to a whole album, even the lame songs that sometimes grow on you.
DWYCK’ was only intended to be a B-side of ‘Take It Personal,’ because we had done a record with Nice & Smooth for their album, Ain’t a Damn Thing Changed, called ‘Down The Line.’ They were returning the favor with ‘DWYCK,’ being that we let them borrow the ‘Manifest’ instrumental.
My nails are my rhythm section when I’m writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails.
What I don’t do is try to like become whoever I’m rapping with. The people who go get an LL album want to hear LL.
It’s very rare that we play a gig and we all come off and say ‘That was great, I had a great time!’ There’s always someone that’s had a bad time. So the goal is always to achieve the next level of performing the piece that you’ve written. You’re looking for something that you haven’t even captured on the album.
When I record an album I’m trying to get as close as possible to that perfect moment.
I’m very serious about what I write and who I allow to produce the music, because I want to make sure it’s a true album, and not just something pushed out there to create hype and more fame for myself.
‘Hell Or High Water’ was written after the end of a relationship, and I do feel like every Passenger album has the obligatory break-up song.
I definitely consider ‘Poses’ – the whole album in fact – to be kind of a miracle. Like the last breath of that moment when decadence is healthy, ‘Poses’ encapsulates that feeling. It’s a kind of song and a kind of album that I’ll never be able to repeat.
It’s good fun, making a solo album, because there’s perhaps songs that wouldn’t get used for the Stones or any other kind of outfit that I’m working with. It’s just nice to be the boss.
I’m pursuing soundtrack work in the southern California area and down the line I plan to make a moody, intense acoustic album. Not all acoustic, but an acoustic – oriented guitar record that I’ve already written most of the material for.
Since her landmark ‘Tapestry,’ Carole King has both oversimplified and over elaborated that masterful album’s style until her music has become something more overtly but less effectively personal.
My joke, which isn’t really a joke, is that there will be one of two tours: the tour for the album that does well, or the tour for the album that stiffs.
I grew up in the era of the concept album. What I do now is pick up on singles, and they are their own complete stories; you don’t necessarily have to hear the rest of the album because I don’t think albums are created like that anymore. They get songs from all over the place.
I’ll probably never put out another album because I’m a tough critic of my work, and I don’t think I could come up to those standards any more.
It’s a shame in a way that people come and go with one album.
Miles Davis was a part of my life from 1947 on. I was born in 1941 and I first heard him in 1947 on a 78 rpm. And then I followed his career, starting with his first solo album in 1951. He was an icon and inspiration and a mentor to me.
You can’t really write a full album about your missus. She’ll start getting the wrong idea and start thinking I like her.
The album ‘Hoodie SZN’ is about the result of where I come from: it gave me this black heart. And the black heart represents depression.
Doing my own album provided me the opportunity to say whatever I wanted.
If I like it, it’s gonna be on my album. You can’t please everyone.
I think the theme of the album probably was just that it was our first record.
God would have to beam into me what I was doing and what the album actually sounded like because usually when I start a project like that, I already know what the album sounds like before I start it.
It’s a massive undertaking putting an album together… It’s not light weight at all.
We were contracted to make a soundtrack album but there really wasn’t enough new material in the movie to make a new record that I thought was interesting.
I knew I was destined to do a solo album, but when I did that first album in 1978, I had no idea it was going to be that well received.
Who really needs a new album from me?
The first album I bought with my own money was ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’
Making a Christmas album is looked upon by some people as the thing you do when you are heading towards retirement.
I’ve got a song on every album, two songs as a matter of fact on every album without Auto-Tune, and that’s the song that nobody talks about. It’s weird.
I moved from New Zealand to Melbourne when I was 17. I’d planned to go to university to study French, but I was offered a contract to write and record an album that was too good to pass up. Looking back now I think that was pretty young but, at the time, I was ready to have an adventure.
Obviously with every new album we make, we always have to believe in it and feel we’ve gone in the right direction.
Making an album can be like being pregnant: you want to pop that thing out and show everybody!
This album, ‘ununiform,’ I didn’t even have to record it if I didn’t want to.
For the second album I look forward to doing a lot of serious collaboration and taking the experiences I’ve had over this last year, good and bad, and working it into the album.
The prime minister in Belgium gave our album to Barack Obama. I was really surprised that he decided to give a CD of us.
Each album has its own cycle. We wanted to capture all those feelings and moments for this touring cycle.
I used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.
When I went to record my first album, which should have been a punk album, there was a synthesiser in the control room. I’d never seen one before but they let me have a go on it and I loved it to bits.
I just always want a new producer. I’m going to have a new producer on the next one. Because I’m the same person, and I feel like, I know I’m going to bring to it a certain sensibility that’s me, and I want to have something different coming out on each album.
I’m envious of ‘Glee’ – artists turned their libraries over for free because they knew it would lead to album sales.
‘Firepower’ is the eighteenth full-length studio album for Judas Priest. That’s a lot of metal songs over the decades, and the writing process is always the same, really.
The song This Kiss was definitely my breakthrough song. After that, Breathe was my breakthrough album.
My first album didn’t come out until I was 26.
Even though everybody’s lives are different, in general we’re all human beings, and we go through the same things: disappointments, the pleasures of life, life and death. That’s always been a really big part of the show to me, making sure the audience feels connected, and that carries through to the album.
‘Supermodel’ was a hard record for me; it was an emotional record to write. I was purging a lot of stuff with that album, and I think the one thing I didn’t really consider, that I’d be supporting it for two years and living in that state of mind every night.
We used to rehearse in unused lecture halls at Imperial and recorded our first album, ‘Queen,’ in 1971 while I was studying for my biology finals – it is amazing I passed.
Yeah, I came in at the end of the Notorious album, played on about five tracks and then we went on a tour. Then we did another album, Big Thing, and then we started writing songs together in 1989.
After playing so many songs in churches for eight or nine years, I’ve learned what songs people react to. Then I just had fun with the arrangements. That’s how this album came together.
One thing, when you’re an actor, you finish something and then you have to worry about what the next gig is. When you’re a musician, you can always write your own stuff, and I’m working on new stuff for a new album right now.
There was an enormous amount of pressure when my first album took off, and I struggled with the speed of everything and the exhaustion from the constant touring.
My ambition is we want artists to be able to afford to create the music they want to create, and if it takes them five years to sit down and make the album they want to make, they should be able to afford that. That’s my goal.
My first album, ‘Get Lifted,’ was a hip-hop soul album that had some of its roots in the church, as far as the sonic choices, in the way that I sing and write songs. I have always had that as part of my background and part of my influence when I am making music.
