Once we get them in the studio, you interview a person the same way you would interview another. You ask them a question. You let them answer. You try to listen closely and then ask a follow-up.
I don’t have a formal home recording studio, but I can record tracks on my computer upstairs in my office.
A big budget studio film is slower, they’ve got so much to create around you. Everything is more complicated.
Money’s not important to me. Movie star acknowledgement is not important to me. I don’t want to be a big studio actress. I don’t want to be in the limelight.
I’ve been messing around in the studio the last couple of years. But I don’t want to worry about being taken seriously as a singer. It just really feels good to do it.
We still spend more time chasing funds than we do in the studio in creative work.
I work out in a studio. Every day, regardless where I am, at least two hours. I need it. I can’t cease it.
I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.
You go into any recording studio in the world, and you see candles, lights, and that Apple light from a Mac.
But at the same time, never having final cut before, I really learned an interesting thing for any studio executive who is reading this: that if a director has final cut, it’s actually easier and more interesting to listen to notes.
I was certainly a better actor after my five years in Hollywood. I had learned to be natural – never to exaggerate. I found I could act on the stage in just the same way as I had acted in a studio: using my ordinary voice, eliminating gestures, keeping everything extremely simple.
If I had a place with a studio where I could paint I’d be happy.
I was 27, an unemployed actress living in a really crappy studio apartment. I had just moved to Los Angeles alone, away from my family. I had cervical and uterine cancer and I was told that I would never be able to carry a baby.
In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called ‘White Feathers.’ It was produced in the studio theatre at the students’ union in early 1999, when I was 21. It’s 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.
No studio in Hollywood wanted ‘Cold Mountain.’ None. No one wanted ‘Ripley,’ no one wanted ‘The English Patient.’ That tells you there isn’t really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.
When we did ‘The Jewel In The Crown,’ we filmed in India first so the actors had an idea of what the heat was like, what it did to you – it slows you down; it’s weighty: the air that you breathe is full of humidity. You are aware of the fact that you’re not in a studio in Manchester.
I spend a lot of time working as a painter and in my studio I go from upstairs where I paint to downstairs where I play and record, so I get this thing crossing over.
Chris is the engineer down at the studio where we do these things. And he’s just such an integral part and he has such a marvelous ear. Also it turns out, we didn’t know, but he’s a pretty good fiddle player.
Even in China. Children there, next to the Great Wall, who had never seen Mickey Mouse responded. So the studio did have that skill to communicate with images.
Music as background to me becomes like a mosquito, an insect. In the studio we have big speakers, and to me that’s the way music should be listened to. When I listen to music, I want to just listen to music.
If I could, I would not do anything else. I’d just be in the studio for my whole life. I would never go to parties, events, and red carpets. I would rather just be in the studio for the whole time. I don’t even care. Nobody has to know what I look like. I just want to make music.
I find I’m not one of these composers that are, you know, walking along a beach or walking on the mountainside in County Donegal that’s, you know, ‘Oh, a melody.’ It’s more a matter of eventually taking that moment with me to the studio, and it begins to evolve.
There’s a band of studio session – hot players – that play on my albums… They’re an eclectic bunch of misfits that I’ve worked with for years and years.
As opposed to touring for three years and then going into the studio and writing an album, I think this record is representative of a lot of everyday people.
It’s an amazing feeling to go into a studio and really be alone.
But I don’t like working on lyrics publicly in the studio – I prefer to take them away and work on them in my bedroom.
A great dream of mine would be to run a design studio full of scientists who think about science as creatively as if they were doing art.
When I’m traveling, I always look for a dance studio. It’s a great workout and a wonderful way to meet new friends in the community.
I look forward to the future – and going into the studio to make new music.
My favorite is still the one that I started off with, which is a Les Paul Standard. I’ve played that at every gig I’ve ever had. And that’s my starting point in the studio.
The problem with doing a schlocky or big budget studio film is that it wouldn’t actually be fun for me. It wouldn’t be exciting.
I do feel most at home playing live, but the feeling of getting into the studio to see the new songs take shape was really incredible.
Well, Hollywood isn’t made up of individual studio heads anymore. It’s made of corporations. And corporations are looking for the bottom line. They don’t want to take chances. They want the money back for stockholders.
If I’m not on tour or in the studio, I’m in nature somewhere, usually some kind of ocean. Playing music has afforded me that. It’s not lost on me that it’s a tremendous opportunity to be able to spend your life being surrounded by nature.
I have my dream job! As a young person training as an actor, walking on the WB studio lot is a dream in itself.
Generalised anger and frustration is something that gets you in the studio, and gets you to work – though it’s not necessarily evident in anything that’s finished.
In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive. Once I’m in my work, I don’t notice where I am.
I’m just looking for the best story being told by the best people and the best part that I can find. If those things add up, I want to be a part of it whether it’s a studio film or, more likely in that instance, an independent film.
At any one time, I’ll have 30 to 40 pieces going on in the studio, so this is not economically driven at all.
In the studio, I do try to have a thought in my head, so that it’s not like a blank stare.
Coke Studio is a big platform for music in Pakistan and I really feel honored to be a part of it.
It’s a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that’s a good thing.
I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don’t. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I’ll come back to.
I would make tea for Joni Mitchell or clean her car, anything to be in the studio and watch her work.
In the studio, I’m always throwing people on different instruments.
You’re in front of an audience, but you’re playing for a camera. There’s this huge adrenaline rush, because you know that besides the audience in the studio, there are millions of people watching at home.
I enter my studio at 9 a.m. I have lunch here, I return right away to my work and I go out to dinner at 8 p.m. My daily tasks vary very much.
It doesn’t matter if you’re doing a studio movie or you’re doing an independent movie. When you get to set and you’re doing a scene, it’s always going to be the same job. I really don’t think about my career, in terms of planning it out and what this does for me.
You go to a studio with a guitar, people are like, ‘Oh this girl’s going to write this song on a guitar.’ Or wants to, or whatever. You go with a ukulele, people are just like ‘Eh, well, whatever.’ They don’t really care. It’s a very non-threatening kind of instrument.
I was in the studio so much, it was about the search for air in a metaphoric sense, and the breathing has more to do with travel for me, about the search musically for open air.
I think people are tired of fake music, man. And there’s a lot of it. Technology has reached the point where any boob can walk into a studio and with a little AutoTuning you can have a hit song. I think it’s pathetic.
A lot of actors said they hated the studio system, but I loved it. It was like a college; it was a great place to learn.
The upside to smoking is that you get to be social. I was looking for a light when I bumped into Ben Harper’s manager. A couple of days later, Ben and I were in the studio.
I was never that into the movies. Never. Even as a youngster. I became interested in movie music only because of the studio orchestras in Hollywood.
If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers.
Hopefully, I can play both sides of the fence. That’s probably what winning the Oscar gives me, the chance to do something with a studio and do other things that I really want to do.
So for my studio purposes, I know that I’m in my studio with technicians who’ve done amazing things to my board and to my power amps and I know what I can deliver out of my studio.
