When someone picks up one of my songs and records it, I'm a flattered man, it's a blessing to me.
I can't say I want to earn a particular award or sell a certain number of records, because even if I do that, the satisfaction only lasts five minutes.
My dad's sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal - his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.
Who you are as a performer is one thing, but when you're making records, you're dealing with musicians' tastes, their goals, their wants, their needs, everyone's individual pride.
Nowadays, you have to sell, like, half a million or a million records just to break even.
I thought the best thing to do to bring me back to reality would be to have a child, and by the time I had my first, Taylor, when I was 25, we'd sold 35 million records as a band, and I'd had enough; I knew my sanity was more important than success.
We asserted ourselves as a music community, and showed legislators that music is positive. Especially if you've sold 300 million records worldwide and pay taxes.
We don't really make bad records, though some people might like some more than others. And we have never really done a bad show. So I think in a way maybe we've been taken for granted.
I didn't want to be a solo Westlife - covers and ballads - and the reason I signed with Capitol Records was because they wanted me to write songs myself. It was pretty scary, but they put me in a studio in Nashville with some new songwriters, and the results were pretty good.
This was during a period when I was producing Brazil '66 records and got infected by Brazilian music.
I'm very proud of 'Backatown,' and usually I don't like to listen to my records.
I didn't graduate from college, so I might as well be on Atlantic Records, right?
We played together for so long and we got to the point where our styles blended together. Even today, sometimes I'll hear our records and I'm not really sure who played what. And we took a bunch of acid together too.
On first listen, it's nice to just soak up the sound without thinking about what it means. It's like a relationship. Records I've had for years mean more to me now than they did years ago.
I don't know why records are treated different than books. I don't know why an Eminem record is different than a Stephen King movie.
If you say I just yell on records, that means you ain't a real fan of me, and I would never even give your comment the time of day.
Will they attack us? Yes. Will they smear our backgrounds and distort our records? Undoubtedly. Will they lie about us, harass our families, namecall to try to intimidate us? They will. There's nothing safe about it. But is it worth it? Well, let me ask you. Is freedom worth it? Is America worth it?
I support engagement, diplomacy, and trade with Cuba, China, Vietnam, and many countries with less than stellar human rights records, because I believe that once enslaved people taste freedom and see the products of capitalism, they will become hungry for freedom themselves.
Our attitude is that we want to cross over. You can't go on making records just for your own hometown.
I remember singing around the house to records that were playing. All kinds of music. And the great James Cleveland was often in our house, and I grew up with his sound as well.
I was in a little punk band and we put out a few punk records that weren't very political, at all.
A friend of mine once told me that I can't screw up when I play my own music. I also take voice lessons, play other peoples' songs out of music books, and occasionally figure out how to play other people's music from records. This keeps my ears, fingers, and mind working.
I get to go to so many different countries and hear so much music and collect totally different records. It's all very inspiring, and I'm trying to embrace that experience because not that many producers get to have that.
I saw an Elvis Presley movie Jailhouse Rock, where he gets out of jail and makes his own records and takes them to the radio stations himself. And then, he puts records in the store. After seeing that, I made records an put them in stores.
I've been there and done all that, sold millions of records, and that doesn't bring you peace.
When I was around 13 or 14, I started getting really into songwriting. And one day, I was rooting through my mum's old tapes and records, and I found 'Grace' by Jeff Buckley. I remember so vividly the first time I put it on. It blew my mind: his voice, the way he could play the guitar. I must have listened to the album over and over for weeks.
The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves.
I know when I started I would have been happy to sound like the Beatles or Joe Tex or whoever. You want to sound like most bands, you want to sound like their records and that's how you learn your chops.
It's real nice and exciting for me to break the records, but it's more exciting for me to be on a winning team.
Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.
To actually put the time and energy into an album that would be better than Pull would be a hell of a lot of work, because I took that band really seriously, way more seriously than people took us. If you go back and listen to the records, you can hear it.
I have lots of records, quite a collection, actually, that I stole from my mom. I have the original 'Thriller' album and I have a really great 'Elton John's Greatest Hits,' and I also have a N.E.R.D. album. Records sound more original. They have more edge.
I plan on making a lot more records, and hopefully one of them will be Grammy worthy.
I've done that kind of stuff in records, where you start going back and you want to just redo everything, destroy everything, because you think it all sucks and you can do it better.
We made records to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records. I still feel that way. I put out a record because I think it's beautiful, not necessarily commercial.
It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.
