I tour whether I have album out or not. I tour more than any other hip-hop artist.
I could find faults with all my albums because that's just a part of being an artist - it's hard being a human being, isn't it?
Quite understandably, people think that if there's a six-year gap or whatever, that it's taken me six years to make the album. It's not really like that at all.
I understand that people want to just listen to a track and put it on their iPod, and that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that, but why can't that exist hand in hand with an album? They're such different experiences.
My career was really odd, because I literally had a greatest hits album out and nobody knew who I was. They knew the songs, but they didn't know me.
I thought I'd do everything on four-track, and then I'll record every instrument myself in a studio, and then I'll have a solo album released by spring.
A few years ago my goal was to try and get the goddamned album made, which put me in a real bad frame of mind.
I think every album you have to stretch further and further, give people another piece of you. But then I always try to deviate from the norm.
You can't control it once you turn it into the label, so there's the expectation that it'll leak a week before the album comes out. That's the world we live in.
I imagine many of my fans share a similarly chaotic feeling in their own lives. This album 'ARTPOP was written to make sense of that chaos.
I feel like I'm only in the beginning of my career. I've only made five albums. It's not a lot.
Right now the focus is the album that is released and then the tour coming up. After the tour they will let us know about the options and offers that came in for us.
You make one solo album, and some people swear you're about to leave the band or there are creative differences.
If part of the purpose of making an album is to get some radio play, then you might as well think about that. But that's not really how we picked the songs.
The Beach Boys already had about four or five albums under our belt when these newcomers, The Beatles, took the U.S. by storm in early 1964.
We were contracted to make a soundtrack album but there really wasn't enough new material in the movie to make a new record that I thought was interesting.
I don't know if I'd ever sing a whole album because I don't know if I'd want to hear my voice for more than three or four songs.
You can't really write a full album about your missus. She'll start getting the wrong idea and start thinking I like her.
I'm trying to get hold of them... the trouble is a lot of the companies that recorded and produced the albums went bust, so I don't know where to get the masters.
I hope everybody thinks they've got the best album. I wouldn't have put mine out if I didn't think it was the best.
I was always the class clown; I made my family laugh, and that was when I was always happiest. I grew up listening to stand-up comedians' albums and watching them on TV, on 'The Tonight Show' and Letterman.
