'Rock n' Roll Animal,' the live album, is one of the greatest live albums out there. It was a huge influence on me.
In those days it was pretty cut and dry. If you had a record company believing in you enough to cut an album then you had better have the ability to work the album on the road.
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.
Actually, recording the Suite Chic album was so much fun and while working on this new album, people that I've worked with from Suite Chic has lend their voice.
Most of the time I like to start an album abroad, not at home, just to avoid the pressure, to not wake up and think, 'OK, it's the first of recording this album.' I like to avoid that.
I'm sick to death of people saying we've made 11 albums that sounds exactly the same, Infact, we've made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.
Avril Lavigne sold a massive amount of albums and she has to top that with her next release. We have four great albums behind us, and it's not going to be as hard to live up to that.
It used to be that you made an album and then you went on the road to promote that album, hoping for good record sales. Well, good record sales basically don't exist any more, and the emphasis has been more on the live show.
Lately, I've been listening to some jazz albums. I love the new Pat Metheny album. John Coltrane. I still like good metal, though!
I definitely don't subscribe to the theory that more instruments, or more vocal tracks, harmony, or double tracking the voice, is a good thing. People do their early albums very stripped down, then each album becomes bloated.
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've done a lot of albums and I kinda know when I'm onto something that was inspirational for me to record and create, and this was one of those projects where I really enjoyed making the album.
So I went out and bought Hard Again by Muddy Waters. That was a big learning curve. I listened to that album again and again and again. James Cotton was the harmonica player on that album.
I do understand that not everyone is going to sit and listen to an Enya album. When someone says it's not their cup of tea, it's not their kind of album, that's fine by me.
The fans are very, very loyal. They're always saying, 'When is the next album?' They know when I finish in the studio it's got to be a few years before the next album.
When making the first album, I think I wrote a song about every six months. The first album was so much about the vocals carrying it.
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.
When I want to put out an album, I want to write it. I want to be able to say that I wrote my album, and all this stuff is from me.
It's trippy to think we have an album that's 10 years old. It's even trippier to think we have a couple of albums older than that.
This is an album of songs that I've always loved, tunes that I heard. For the first time in 53 years of recording, I really had control over an entire album, start to finish.
You could be Top 5 on iTunes, but for people to buy an album, they've got to have a connection with an artist. Every time I bought someone's album, it was about the connection. I was loving everything, from their raps to their style. I wanted to meet...
