I want a hit. I don’t think anybody spends 12 months writing and recording an album, making something cool, and says, ‘Great, I hope this doesn’t sell.’ I don’t understand that mind-set. I want hits: a big bunch of them.
Most people, from their second album on, find it much harder to be as spontaneously creative as they were with their first couple of records, and some people only have one thing that they do.
I loved George Carlin and Dean Martin. I was one of those kids who had every comedy album.
On the first album I was saying, that’s just one part of me. And then I was thinking, well, am I going to hide the rest of me now just because I’m afraid of something? No. I’m just going to be myself.
I don’t tend to have a favorite album; I tend to have favorite tracks. There are flaws in every album that spoil it for me.
It’s a miracle was the last track recorded for the album, we based it on the rhythm from the middle of ‘Late Home Tonight, where there’s Graham Broad playing lots and lots of drums with me shouting in the background, pretending to be a mad Arab leader.
What started it all was the Kanye album, ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.’ We started listening to that and just fell in love with it, fell in love with his production style.
Putting out a debut album is a bit scary – I want it to be just right, so I took some extra time to finish it. Eminem’s increased involvement has been such a blessing; I’m getting guidance from an artist I really admire and trust.
I also mixed David Bowie’s Young Americans album in 5.1 earlier this year and it will be available very soon. Even the original stereo mixes have been re-mastered and sound amazingly good, better than ever, in fact!
If Miles Davis hadn’t died it would have been interesting to do an album with him, but there wasn’t much else that would have got me into the studio… although Herbie Hancock has just been in touch about doing something and that would be an interesting combination.
Michael Giles the first drummer of King Crimson, never agreed to the name King Crimson. But then, if you’d knew Michael, you would know he didn’t agree to the album cover either. So maybe Michael didn’t agree to the point of definition with many things.
You know, I always root for the older athlete. I root for the second album. I root for solo careers after the rock star breaks the band apart.
I treat every album as a new beginning, so I’m asking myself, ‘What is pop music now? What are people consuming?’ and I take these things into effect.
I really love hip hop. My cousin Nas came out with an album ‘Life Is Good,’ and I love that album, but I also love Maroon 5.
I hate the whole ‘record your album, do your promo campaign, have a year off to write another album’ pattern. As an artist, you should keep creating as much as you possibly can.
I can see that if this was an album done 10 or 15 years ago we could see we were moving on to some place else.
I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album.
I’ve been blessed because there are a lot of great singers out there that didn’t make it past their first album.
Our friends in the group Chicago, they just numbered theirs and we thought that was kind of neat but it made continuity from album to album and that was our way of doing it.
Music is an essential part of my life and I’m completely lost without a good album to listen to or my iPod in my pocket!
I feel really relevant and creative, and I don’t think I would’ve made an album if I didn’t feel relevant. I wouldn’t have said a word.
I had deeper, more reflective songs on the first album.
That’s usually what happens with AC/DC: you make an album, and then you’re on the road flat out. And the only time you ever get near a studio is generally after you’ve done a year of touring.
I had sat in one day in Central Park with Bonnie and Delaney, and Duane was playing with them, so I asked if he wanted to work on an album. You never had to say to him how to play the guitar.
When I did ‘Horses,’ I never expected to make another album.
All I really wanted to do was make an album that was going to be just back to what I like to do… And it was a coincidence that these new bands, this new wave of bands, were doing Alice and Iggy rock.
I think I’ve grown a lot in the last few years, and I needed to express myself as an artist on this. It wasn’t necessarily about going in and making an album chocked full of hit singles… there were a lot of things I did out of the joy and the want to do it.
I got to live out my 11-year-old fantasies – I got to go on stage with Green Day. Billie Joe called my name from the stage. ‘Dookie’ was the first album I ever bought. I covered the whole of ‘Nimrod’ and he’d heard it. That was like the 11-year-old girl dreamed.
Mick Jagger can’t even make a successful solo album, and the Stones are the biggest rock group that ever was.
When you look at the Lady Gagas of the world, or the Jay-Zs, or the Black Eyed Peas, these are people who have one album release and it’s a worldwide one.
I called the album ‘The Chemo’ because it seems like the industry and music overall is dying slowly.
It’s about giving the people what they want. So many people have told me that they’ve made love to my records so what I’ve delivered this time is an album about sex. Pretty much every song has that theme. Straight no chasers, it’s booty music!
