Our first album didn't work because we tried to be something we're not.
When you hear 'Truth of Touch,' I believe you recognize that it is me; however it's not the typical Yanni album.
Just about the entirety of the first album, 'Brown Sugar,' I wrote it, the majority of that record in my bedroom in Richmond. And all of the demos for it were done on a four-track in my bedroom. I think EMI was a little leery of me being in the studio producing it on my own, which is what I was fighting for.
I like collaboration because, first of all, I'm good at writing lyrics. I don't know how to make beats. I don't play instruments. I'm not a good singer. So even when you see a solo album of mine, it's still a collaboration.
But my main thing that I would love to see as a fan of 'Glee,' like I said, is to really get into the character and who they are and what they do outside of school. I think that that's interesting. And then of course the themed stuff and the album episodes are all really cool too.
After 'Sports' came out in the fall of 1983, everything changed for me. Four of the album's singles became top-10 hits, and by the end of June in 1984, the album was No. 1 on the Billboard chart. It was quite a ride, and for the first time I had enough money to live the way I wanted.
I'm a player and I do it because I love playing whether it's for my album or someone else's.
In those days it was pretty cut and dry. If you had a record company believing in you enough to cut an album then you had better have the ability to work the album on the road.
Vinyl is the real deal. I've always felt like, until you buy the vinyl record, you don't really own the album. And it's not just me or a little pet thing or some kind of retro romantic thing from the past. It is still alive.
My wife has them all in a vault... a copy of every album.
There are always some doubts when you do a new album though. You wonder whether you succeeded or not, especially when you waited as long as I did for this one - seven years. You're never really sure if it will be a nice record or not.
If you wait this long to put an album out, you'd better be sure you tried your best.
I'm recording an album. It's sort of techno mixed with garbage - you, know, intense in-your-face music.
I think pop culture is the greatest subject matter out there - 'Other People's Lives,' as we wrote about on the last Duran Duran album. Most ideas for great songs come from real situations, something your friend said to you the night before, the girl that just left, or something traumatic in your life.
Michael Giles the first drummer of King Crimson, never agreed to the name King Crimson. But then, if you'd knew Michael, you would know he didn't agree to the album cover either. So maybe Michael didn't agree to the point of definition with many things.
When creating an album, one of the first things you have to think about is what you want your production style to be.
I can still do clothing, movies, cartoons. I'mma get mine regardless. Whether I put an album out or not, I'm still gonna see a check.
Well actually, we are working on the live album from the shows in Japan. I'm trying to get that finished.
It's a tough thing to know that when you're making your album, you're going to end up collaborating with, say, Wal-Mart, on your artwork. That just sucks. And the pressure behind getting the numbers real fast is, to me, dizzying.
I didn't enjoy 'Topographic Oceans' at all. It was a double album, and the truth is it was padded out, and I didn't like that. But I was a fan of Yes - still am - and as such, I'm entitled to say what I think.
Mick Jagger can't even make a successful solo album, and the Stones are the biggest rock group that ever was.
I've got a song on One Direction's album called 'Tell Me A Lie'. It's a really cute song - I love it. I loved that they liked it. They sound really great on it. I already have it - I'm so VIP with my copy on my computer! It does sound really good.
Even though we didn't actually record it as the Move I had already written a song called 'Dear Elaine', which I subsequently put on the Boulders album. I thought at the time that was probably the best song I'd written.
There may be a new album, and there may not. Right now, we're encouraging bootlegging because there have been some great live things that ended up on the Internet. Rather than try to stop it, we like it. If nobody gave a crap about you, they wouldn't bother to bootleg you.
The second album is the hardest to write. It's nothing like the first album.
The success of Torn was a bit too much for me. I took a year off and was still scared to start the second album.
Between each album I try to gain a new insight that I didn't have before and perhaps write a song about something that I've written about before, but from a fresh viewpoint.
The song This Kiss was definitely my breakthrough song. After that, Breathe was my breakthrough album.
One album has absolutely nothing to do with the other.
It don't take me no three days to record no album.
At the time, there was a great disagreement over 'The Wild and the Innocent,' and I was asked to record the entire album over again with studio musicians. And I said I wouldn't do it, and they basically said, 'Well hey, look, it's going to go in the trash can.' That's the record business, you know.
My mother kept asking me, 'When are you going to do a gospel album?' And I've always wanted to do a gospel album. Everybody was going on about it, so mom started hounding me more.
I am more interested in how people interpret the phrase 'Elect The Dead' than what I may or may not have intended. I named the album after the track, which is a spiritual song about love, life and death and is the heaviest song on the album without having any heavy instruments.
By packaging a full album into a bundle of music with ringtones, videos and other combinations and variations, we found products that consumers demonstrably valued and were willing to purchase at premium prices. And guess what? We've sold tons of them.
That's why it's called Sebastian Bach. I mean, it's a permanent band, pretty much, but if I jam with other people, it just makes a better album, I think.
Music is an essential part of my life and I'm completely lost without a good album to listen to or my iPod in my pocket!
