You know, I'm a fan of Laurie Anderson. One of my favorite records is 'The Ugly One With the Jewels,' a spoken-word record. It's an extraordinary album.
I grew up with 'best-of' cassettes. My first Smiths record was 'Hatful Of Hollow,' and I had hits albums by Elton John and The Cars.
It's like whether you're in a huge movie or you've just recorded an incredible album you've got to do the next thing, and that's part of being an artist.
Some of my favourite record and album covers and stuff have all been the singer, and they create a character, and they dress up a little bit.
I want to be an all round entertainer, I want to act, make films, make albums, do whatever I can.
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.
I think it would be nice to sell 15 million albums as a solo artist. I'd have to deal with all the repercussions of that, but that wouldn't be too bad.
I've made a few albums in such an autonomous way; it often has been exhausting. It's almost difficult to enjoy the process when you take on so much.
If you start out trying to achieve a specific thing - like doing stadium shows or going into the studio and doing an album - the end result is what counts.
Rounder Records decided to call the album Move It On Over, much to my chagrin but they knew what they were doing. It took off and to this day I can't figure out why.
Bob Dylan's first couple of records in the 60's weren't considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album.
If one artist sells five million albums, the tendency is for other artists to say, 'Maybe I should do a little of that, too.' That can be tough to resist.
I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.
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'm not trying to sound pretentious, but we did sell 12 million records on the first album, so we did get paid a little bit.
There will be some tracks on the next album which that will consist of mostly noise and feedback, whereas others may just have guitar parts and samples.
I wanted to produce Nancy LaMott's albums, so I created my own record company.
I was at number one in Australia with both my album and my single. And then I was told I had cancer. I thought, 'What a strange turn of events.'
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.
After the 'Grey Album,' everyone thought of me as the hip-hop guy, the remix maestro. I didn't know how to show them otherwise.
Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
