R. Kelly is an image, a brand. That's my job. There's a whole other side of me that's Robert, who is a father, a friend. But then I put on the game face and go into the studio and do the music. That's just another day at the office.
I think I'm the only singer who doesn't have a temper. The only time I got angry was at a music studio when I was made to wait for three hours without being informed about the delay in the recording.
I write a lot of music in my time off and I compose most of the songs on guitar. I've actually gone into the studio and recorded a few things, but it's tough trying to sell a song. It's all about finding that hook, that melody.
It's a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.
More live recording. I have missed the boat over my career by not doing every second or third CD live because things happen onstage that don't happen in the studio.
I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don't. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I'll come back to.
What one does in the studio is to pose a series of problems to oneself. I've got to look for some deeper meaning, for some reason for this thing to be in the world. There's enough stuff in the world.
Indian films have this obsession with hygienic clean spaces, even though the country's not so clean. They're either shot in the studios or shot in London, in America, in Switzerland - clean places. Everywhere except India.
I was scared to do anything in the studio because it felt so claustrophobic. I wanted to be somewhere where things could happen and the subject wasn't just looking back at you.
A pitfall of making a comedy with a studio-and it's also an American cultural thing-is that I get tired of being encouraged to go always for laughs.
Most of the contract people at MGM stayed and stayed and stayed. Why? Because the studio looked after them. Warner Brothers wouldn't - they were always spanking somebody or selling them down the river.
I don't really have studios. I wander around around people's attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.
Locations are all tough, all miserable. I never left the sound stage for 18 years at Warners. We never went outside the studio, not even for big scenes.
My son was five months old, and I built a makeshift studio in my living room so that I could do the attachment parenting approach and write the record at the same time. That was fortuitous, that we could build that in the house.
For me it was perfect, because it wasn't a very competitive environment, and it was a studio program. They basically send you off, and say, bring us some work, and we'll help you improve it. It really rewarded self-discipline.
I write R-rated action dramas, and every year that goes by, that gets to be a smaller and smaller world you have to work in. You have to think of how to get the studio excited and sell them something.
When you record an album and it goes platinum... yeah, you're in the studio and you work hard for months, but it's not like your whole body hurts. Maybe you get a little hoarse and tired. But on 'Dancing With the Stars,' everything hurts.
I actually worked for a small company in Ohio that sort of farmed out work from Disney and Dreamworks, so I really only ever worked in two studios.
My live sound does not work in the studio, which is a completely different animal. Every little thing is detrimental to the sound. And if someone moves a mic, you've lost it. It's pretty much a case of 'lock the door and set up a police line.'
I enter my studio at 9 a.m. I have lunch here, I return right away to my work and I go out to dinner at 8 p.m. My daily tasks vary very much.
I like writing for movies. It's nice to be alone working on fiction in your room, and then it's nice to be in a room with a bunch of people working on a movie.
