It's always very special for me to work Chicago. Both of the record companies I was with, early on, were based in Chicago. The music was always huge there.
Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture, right? Where you're making your own records and selling them online.
I buy records from all across the board. I get kind of a hybrid of influences in my own music.
I really want to put the emphasis on creating music. I want to cut a record. I want to start going on tour.
I just want to keep making music, recording and trying different things. I don't want to do the same thing all the time.
The fact of the matter is that 40 years ago, unless you bought the record, you couldn't hear the music. It was such a narrow track in comparison to today.
My responsibility is to the artist first. There's something that artists intrinsically know about their music and their fanbase that neither the record company nor the producer really knows.
At the beginning, at my shows, there were a lot of press and people from record companies. Now there are people who are there to just listen to the music and are genuine fans.
The music that I wrote and recorded is music that I really enjoy listening to. It's just dumb luck that a lot of other people do, too.
Modern recording has made it so that people can spend forever taking shortcuts and making everything uniform, but that strips music of what makes it exciting.
My mom loved to sing - and I'll go on record and say she was the worst singer ever. I'd get up and move away from her!
When you're riding with your mom, and you're a kid, you'd listen to 'Dear Mama' and the radio friendly records. I used to sneak and listen to Too $hort.
I'm always happy when I hear about people selling records or selling books or selling movies. It makes me proud of them.
I'm very particular about the kind of music that I record and sing, and it would be the same way about the kind of movies that I would do.
Man in Instructional Recording: [flamboyantly, as Kitano exercises] BR Radio Exercise time!
You know what I'd really like to do? I'd like to record some white Chicago jazz.
When I was 15 I became a full-time singer in a band. At 18 I made my first record.
I knew that it was my only shot to be taken seriously in the recording industry, because it's fast and broad.
There's not a whole lot of media interest in me other than just the records that I make.
Every album is just a greatest hits of whatever songs are on a pile when I go in to make a record.
I just was not going to subject my record to the bleak prospects of a primary election.
