After ‘Sports’ came out in the fall of 1983, everything changed for me. Four of the album’s singles became top-10 hits, and by the end of June in 1984, the album was No. 1 on the Billboard chart. It was quite a ride, and for the first time I had enough money to live the way I wanted.
And then the last album, ‘Get It’, was done over a shorter period of time and I started using other musicians, as opposed to playing all the instruments myself like I did on the other two.
You don’t try to get influenced by everything that’s going on with all the other music around you. You don’t listen to the radio – I mean, I don’t. When I get ready to do an album, I don’t listen to anybody else; I don’t wanna be influenced.
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.
My relationship with Music Row has always been, from my end, optimistic and hopeful that there is more than one way to approach the writing, recording, and marketing of an album.
I don’t go into any album with pressing issues. I just try to write songs.
If you’re buying an album because of the face on it, you’re stupid.
Now I’m having to live with sales of around 50,000 per album – but I’m pretty content with my place in the general scheme of things, even if it’s meant I don’t drive a fancy car and can’t afford grand vacations.
I can still do clothing, movies, cartoons. I’mma get mine regardless. Whether I put an album out or not, I’m still gonna see a check.
Living in the past is a Jethro Tull album, not a smart poker strategy.
I did the Broadway album unfortunately in a year when there were no hits.
I really wanna do a Spanish album. I have that Latin culture background. It’s a part of me. I’m not the best Spanish speaker, but I have a longing to connect with that. I just think how supportive the Latin community has been, even during ‘Idol.’ I’d like to give back with something like that.
I never do any album to beat it. I do it to extend it.
I always want to make an album that lets people immerse in it, kind of like you get caught up in a good movie.
The most frustrating thing for musicians who want to play stuff from the new album is when everyone goes out to buy a beer.
I didn’t ever want to make a rap album. I considered it too limiting. Now that’s exactly what I’ve gone and done.
I’m only at home for, like, a month when I’m doing an album – at the most.
With Dollars And Cents on the album, we had it as a band jam and I sometimes spend evenings playing with records over the top of things we were working on to see what works.
I have grown up but that should be a positive thing. When you look at a photo album it’s lovely to remember being so young but it’s also good to know you grew up!
So that’s what’s going on right now, and I’m looking to put out an album within the next six months.
We still haven’t played Madison Square Garden. That’s a benchmark. Something will have gone seriously wrong if we don’t play Madison Square Garden for this album.
The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.
What’s the point of re-releasing an album? The original sounded good, why change something about it?
It becomes more important to me as time goes on to make every album the best thing I’ve ever done, so it’s a lot of self-imposed pressure that also kind of slows me down a bit.
In all the years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve never launched a tour and launched an album at basically the same time. Doing one of those things is enough!
I actually had a week where I literally wrote four songs and all of them are on my album. But sometimes you’ll go a week where you’ll write songs and they never see the light of day. So that process takes a long time.
I hate it when bands do that; they’re so proud of their new album, they have to play all of it and a couple of golden oldies.
I think every Metallica album is unique in its own way.
I would make far more money if every song were my own, but I don’t write to fill up the album with my songs.
A Hard Day’s Night’ is the most perfect pop album you’ll ever get to hear in your life; it’s filled with definitive versions of the two-minute pop song.
The average rap life is two or three albums. You’re lucky to get to your second album in rap!
Everyone’s just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it’s a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.
I want to put my vibe and my feel of music into an album and have people from different places around the world feel that and hear that.
Well it has been very exciting and very changing as well. Celebrating the 40th year and having the album out and the Channel 4 documentary and I resigned from Blind Date.
Between the record companies being the way they are and the fact that people can just download one song instead of buying a whole album, it’s hard to make a good living nowadays.
The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can’t really explain – let’s just say it’s all I can really do while I’m doing it.
When I recorded my solo album, ‘Keep It Hid,’ in 2008, I’d gotten more interested in songwriting, inspired by reading Charles Bukowski and connecting with unfancy, interesting language.
If I would get an album out every eight months and if I would write songs that were more up-tempo and try to focus more on making singles, then I could probably get more attention. But I don’t think the albums would be very fun to listen to, and it would be a drag for me.
We’re gonna release a studio album probably a year from now and we’ve got these recordings that we did with Coco Taylor and Johnny Johnson, who was Chuck Berry’s piano player.
I’ve started working on a new album, I’m writing a new book… there are a lot of good things on the horizon.
Musically, ‘Fallen’ is a cross between ‘Belus’ and something new, inspired more by the debut album and ‘Det Som Engang Var’ than by ‘Hvis Lyset Tar Oss’ or ‘Filosofem.’
I like listening to good music – and I can’t stop playing my album.
Rihanna is always on my playlist. I think she pumps you up and gets the day going. I also love – and I know this doesn’t sound like a workout album – the Lumineers, lately, and Taylor Swift.
Somewhere around the fifth, sixth album, we got this little formula together where we knew how to record Too $hort songs. You need the bassline, a good drum pattern, call in the keyboard, the guitars – it’s just a way we mixed it all together.
By packaging a full album into a bundle of music with ringtones, videos and other combinations and variations, we found products that consumers demonstrably valued and were willing to purchase at premium prices. And guess what? We’ve sold tons of them.
So I am one of those bass players who can do something and musically, it was back then and now it is even more, if you noticed on the new album, I am not playing all the time anymore.
I think it was probably down to the fact that we weren’t together personally as a band. We weren’t pulling in the same direction. I always feel if you’re having a good time in the studio it actually comes across on the tape and that was a bit of a miserable album for us.
I grew up the biggest fan of the Cure. Knew every lyric, had every album, B-side, single, poster, everything. Then cut to fifteen years later, and we’re working on songs together. Ridiculous.
We’re putting a lot of pressure on ourselves for this second album and so we want to make it as great as we possibly can.
But I also enjoy music outside the band. I’ve been doing production for other people, including Robert Wyatt. Check him out. The album we did together, ‘Rock Bottom,’ I think it’s really lasted well. It’s a 35-year-old album, but it worked.
It is one thing to record an album but it’s a huge difference when people play it and listen to it and embrace it the way that I do. It has always been my dream to get my music out to the world and have people hear it.
My sister discovered the Beatles when she was about 11 and I’m four years younger. So we had nothing but Beatles paraphernalia. Every night I fell asleep to a different Beatles album.
You know, my first album, some of those jokes I’d done for twelve years because I couldn’t throw ’em out.
The people I chose to work with me on this album are there because I have a personal relationship with them.
There’s always apprehension whenever I launch anything, it seems. When I launch a tour, people are always, ‘Oooh, is this gonna work?’ And when I launch an album: ‘Ooh, is this gonna work?’ Or a new video. ‘Really?’ It’s always like that – but I’ve always acted on the impulse that I have nothing to lose.
On record dates like that I never felt too nervous because everything was really overdubbed. When we did that album, we were in the studio for probably a week, so you had a lot of opportunity to fix things.
It was quite a shot in the head to do the album and then have it shot down by nonmusical idiots.
You never know when you put out an album that’s unique whether it’ll get beat up for it or not.
