Every album, I’m worried that I’m a dork and a fraud – ‘What if I can’t sing anymore?’ Then I stop thinking and start playing guitar, and I realize that it’s okay to suck, and move forward.
I think it’s important to update my fans on what I’m doing and where I’m going next and when my next single is going to drop and my album.
When creating an album, one of the first things you have to think about is what you want your production style to be.
We sold 1.5 million copies of the ‘Abracadabra’ album and 26,000 copies of ‘Italian X-Rays.’
We knew we wanted to put a lot of melody into it – a lot more than what we did on our first album.
The mystical poetry of William Blake’s artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.
I don’t want people to get confused. I’m not going to be putting out a gospel album.
The Germany I was enthused with was more old fashioned and kind of romantic. I just got there, and the next thing you know, I had this huge gilded album. It was kind of an amazing experience because I didn’t intend it to be that way.
Well, for the My Generation album, there was nothing to be nervous about in them days. We used to take every day as it came. Every day was just a gig and I think we did the recording between gigs literally.
The success of Torn was a bit too much for me. I took a year off and was still scared to start the second album.
I buy DVDs almost every week. I’m more of a film buff, so I usually buy more DVDs than CDs, but if I like someone’s album, I will buy the CD of it.
It may come as a surprise, but Frou Frou was really like a kind of little holiday from my own work. Guy and I, we have always worked together, and then over the years, it became clear that we wanted to do a whole album together. It was very organic and spontaneous – just one of those wonderful things that happens.
Chart numbers can be deceiving. An album doesn’t have to sell that much these days to show up really high on the charts.
You can have the platinum album. But, you know, when you still feel like you haven’t quite found your place in the world, it kind of gives a crazy offset.
It’ll be basically a live album, but it will also include songs, Judas Priest songs, the audience have never heard before, because we felt we wanted to give the kids something else, something they haven’t already bought.
My path is exactly where I want it to be. I’m doing my thing. I’m getting better with every album.
How many pictures have you torn up because you hate them? What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable – and they’re screaming the next minute. I’ve never seen a family album of screaming people.
The second album of Black Mages is currently in the process of recording and the basic tracks have already been completed. Hopefully sometime in the future we will be able to have a concert.
I feel that I see John Lennon now as not a celebrity. I did then. I saw him as a cardboard cutout on an album cover.
I’d like to do a pop album with an R and B influence. I definitely want to have those big ballads with the uptempo hits as well.
For me, my favourite music was things like The Bee Gees, ABBA and ‘The White Album.’ The 70s is the period that I love more than anything.
My first album is playful.
The Thriller album is still the biggest album of all time. That is still returning huge royalty cheques.
The new album is a childhood dream come true. Got to sing with Ronnie Spector, got to cover a bunch of songs that were influential in drawing a line between the punk form and original rock and roll.
I don’t know what’s more embarrassing, these musicians and actors talking about politics in interviews or the media actually giving them credibility about it. It’s absurd that a celebrity could speak out on the economy or politics with no more justification than a hit album or a movie.
I have absorbed my life now. I am ready for my music to unfold. I know time flies, but before the end of this year, the album will be out. Even if it kills me.
I have complete artistic control, and I just do my best album every time and trust it to fate.
I have come to the conclusion – and I don’t know why it took me so long, but nevertheless, I’m here now – that a lot of people tell me they don’t get enough guitar on my albums. So I decided to do an album where the guitar would be the singer, playing the melody.
I wouldn’t think a blues album would be that commercially successful, but I don’t really care. I’d do it for the love of blues, not for the money. I’ve got plenty of money.
I tour whether I have album out or not. I tour more than any other hip-hop artist.
I think that debut albums are supposed to sound sort of raw. You don’t want to record ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ as your first album, because where do you go from there?
You want to be as successful as possible. You wanna have the strongest legs to stand on as possible for every album that you’re doing.
Anybody with a sense of humor is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end.
I wanna record these girls individually. And then, I wanna cut a blues album on me. But all of it, original stuff, you know. When I listen to the blues today, it’s like they all sounds similar. I wanna do something different, to try to add to the blues flavor.
I picked and co-wrote the songs that if I was a guy who would be spending my hard-earned money buying an album I would want to hear.
Slow, Deep And Hard was a great album, even though it was probably our least selling record.
By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn’t need pen or paper – my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.
I don’t see why women have to get naked to sell an album. It’s crazy.
I made an album I’m very proud of, and that’s about it.
I don’t ever land on an album title until I know exactly what’s going on the record, because you never know until it’s all said and done.
I think I got turned onto The Beach Boys for the first time with the ‘Endless Summer’ album in 1974. The power of that music still, to this day, bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. You don’t have to think about it; it’s something that you feel.
My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn’t writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.
I still think the best metal bands have a blues feel. The first Black Sabbath album is kind of a bludgeoning of blues. Deep Purple also started out as a blues band.
I’m working on my new album right now. Hopefully to get that out at the top of 2005, January 2005.
I wanted this album to sound like a big crocheted blanket – to be warm yet to have a lot of space.
When I did ‘Ephorize,’ I didn’t know that later on I’d be releasing another album. It just came.
I don’t own an ABBA album, and I never had the urge to go and buy one. If you’re just talking about well crafted pop songs, they were fantastic.
When I hit my 20s, I took a chill pill and relaxed because throughout my teens I was churning out an album a year. It was a treadmill of work then recording, promoting and touring.
In fact, I wouldn’t really call this a Gospel album, I call it more an inspirational album.
If I did meet somebody, I would only ever make room for someone that loved me how I deserved to be loved. Until then… I’ve got my shoes, I’ve got my album, my dog.
I feel that my playing on the first album was probably some of my best.
There’s a bootleg album that was recorded when I was 14 or 15, a compilation of things live at different clubs. Songs like Girl from Ipanema and Cry Me A River. I don’t know what the title of it is.
My dad was a keen philatelist and, when he died, he left me an album he’d curated over some 40 years. He’d handpicked every item, saying each one reminded him of me. I opened it to discover the pages were full of beige stamps bearing the image of George V. Take from that what you will.
And, he’d seen me in Panama, and he talked about maybe doing something in New York so I hooked it up when I came here and I recorded in 1969 my first album with Pete Rodriguez.
I want to relate. I don’t want to just rap and go to the next album.
And since discriminating fans can pick and choose exactly what they want to buy, artists and their labels are more conscious than they’ve ever been of making sure that every song on a new album is as good as can be.
I guess when we were up against it, we knew this album was going to be compared to all the classic early material, because it was going back to the original five.
I’ve always said I can’t tell sometimes that people even have an album out until I see them nominated for a Grammy. I think country gets dumped on across the board by the Grammys.
I hold ‘Mi Tierra,’ my first Spanish-language album, very close to me because that was all done in my native tongue and won me my first Grammy.
When I wrote those first songs for the Truckers, songs like ‘Outfit’ and ‘Decoration Day,’ those were strong songs, very strong songs. But had I been in the position of writing an entire album at that point in time, I don’t think the whole album would have been of that kind of quality.
