It was just me in my basement honing my skills, hearing songs on the radio and trying to manipulate them and then writing over those, and I started with local artists in Boston, writing records for them.
[ :] If ‘fulfilled prophecy’ is your criterion, why do you not believe in materialistic science, which has an unparalleled record of fulfilled prophecy? Consider, for example, eclipses.
'Evita' was four pieces of slick paper and a record album. It's the most scary, to sit down and dictate a musical scene by scene. It was a musical unlike anything I'd ever seen before myself.
We were tremendously encouraged by the testing of Analyze That. Audiences loved it. They were telling us that they liked it as much as the original. We recorded the laughs in the theater.
I used to do little sketches into my cassette tape recorder when I was a little boy. I would just turn it on and just start doing voices and characters. I just loved it.
Most people, from their second album on, find it much harder to be as spontaneously creative as they were with their first couple of records, and some people only have one thing that they do.
Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
Records are one thing, and obviously, without hit songs, you don't have the opportunity to do your shows. But my live show has always been my selling tool.
We are not a Zappa cover band. We only play Frank's songs that were recorded by the Mothers of Invention and I think a lot of those songs were complex.
Some musicians like to decorate their walls with discs saying: '1 million records sold in America.' I prefer to put up discs marking sales in lesser-known countries.
McDonald's is almost 50 years old. For 47 years we had a pretty consistent track record of being able to deliver admirable sales.
All of the sudden the audiences started getting younger and the spread of the attendance was really wide. I think it's as a result of the records selling more that they started following our careers.
We provided complete protection to witnesses - right of attorney, right of record, right to cross-examine, and open hearing if they desired. Only Mr. Lane asked for an open hearing.
We had an EP out and all of a sudden we find record companies are interested in us, and we're thinking, 'Oh, that's really nice, but we don't think we're ready for it.'
Ian and Sylvia, who, when you got right down to it, were essentially country and western singers. I just recorded his Four Strong Winds. It's a wonderful song.
I think the film is beautifully realised. His legacy as a journalist was recorded - as it were - well, and certainly the important issues of the '50s - or even today - are delivered and presented to the audience in a rather honest and objective way.
I also wanted to make a record that was about other things than romance, yeah, after two years on the road singing all the songs from the first album, I got kind of tired of that.
The difficult thing about a pop record is that you're given guidelines: it has to have 3 choruses, and then it must be between 3 minutes fifteen seconds and three minutes forty-five seconds.
People I look to: again, Hank Aaron, man you challenged the status quo and the records of the game. Monumental feats in an era where people didn't like that.
I made a dollar a day sweeping a laundry out. Then we made a record that was number two in Los Angeles. We got so excited hearing it on the radio that Carl threw up.
Modern records are all made with virtually identical gear, software plug-ins and everything. Everybody wants everything to sound like the last thing that was popular because they're chasing their tails.
