Everyone is looking for connections between the songs. I don't usually approach a record as a concept. There's no overriding theme I'm trying to represent. It's all about the individual songs.
I think that debut albums are supposed to sound sort of raw. You don't want to record 'Sgt. Pepper's' as your first album, because where do you go from there?
I'm not on a record like some rapper trying to boast about my clothes or where I'm from. I'm creating stories, experiences, the way places make me feel, the way a person makes me feel.
You never know what's going to happen sometimes, or what you think's going to happen never happens, or when you least expect it, the Santana record comes along and just blows up.
For eight or 10 years, I got wrapped up in chasing records. Everything was a number. Didn't matter what I won, it was a number. Every horse I rode was a number.
I had already done Rainbow in Curved Air and had a big record on CBS. I was launched to have a long career and then I just dropped out and went to India.
Throughout the evening I would be recording these long saxophone delays and about four hours into the concert, if I wanted to take a break I would just play back the saxophone.
I want to be known as a professional weirdo. There aren't many Salvador Dalis or Buckminster Fullers left. If I become popular enough, I can establish the next step for records.
When you do a record like 'Talk,' and you're happy with it, and it reaches your ambitions and then doesn't sell as well as you wanted, it kind of takes the wind out of your sails a little.
Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.
Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.
I'm a bit of an insomniac. I'm always thinking. I've got a lot of ideas for lyrics and shows. I have a notepad by the side of the bed and voice recorders around the house.
I'm friends with Carla Olsen and she's doing a lot of producing these days. She's getting quite a little collection of records that she's produced. She's real busy.
I didn't go out shooting for anybody in particular because I shot for everybody unparticular. I make records for Muslims, Christians, rock 'n roll kids, skateboard kids.
When I was a kid and I bought a record, I ripped that thing open, I wanted to know who was playing what, what studio it was cut at, who was the string arranger, who was the engineer.
I was two and a half and my folks would put it on the record player and I would run around the house screaming, but I haven't been that hip since.
Sometimes, people forget my record of fiscal conservatism on major issues in the state legislature. The greatest example is my voting against the pension borrowing scheme in 1997.
I have a lot of memories, but I don't go into capitalizing on that. Something's got to be my own. I'm not doing the record to sit here and broadcast my memories of my father.
Before I had a record deal, I was living in New York and playing anywhere I could, from somebody's house to an open mic to coffeeshops.
How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.
In so many interviews, they bring up the sexual aspect of the record. I've had some journalists say it sounds like I'm lying down in bed singing with a microphone. It gets so old!
