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.
I shout at the radio when someone starts talking over the end of a song. Shut up! I don't want to hear that the DJ has just found a mouldy sandwich in the corner of the studio. Nor do I like it when the magic of something you're watching is shattered by an advert for Argos.
Karl Lagerfeld looks very tough because of the glasses, and he has all these rings and the leather gloves, and he's so smart. But he's a very nice person... when he comes into a room or studio, he is going to say hello to each person, and the same when he leaves.
When I get into the studio, it's not about trying to get a good song, it's about whatever comes naturally.
The best advice he gave me was to carry on. It would have been difficult to set foot back inside a TV studio if I hadn't carried on - I don't know if I would have ever gone back in.
In the studio system, things are expected of a film. By the first, second, third act, there's a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system.
I want to build a studio in my backyard. The interest rates are low now, so who knows.
Coming from my bedroom in San Antonio to this big world and going from singing covers off my laptop to making music in this nice studio, making professional-sounding music - it's just weird.
I don't have any desire to go back into the studio, and I certainly don't have any desire to go back on the road.
Well, the Empire State was about 40' high in the studio. King Kong was a little model about 2' high, and the scenery that he worked in was in proportion to his size.
Studio 54 made Halloween in Hollywood look like a PTA meeting.
Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year.
Ampeg made incredible guitar heads in the early Nineties and then stopped. And I don't know why. The one we used had a nice clean, warm sound, and it blended well with the other amps that were in the studio.
Just because it reads well doesn't mean it's always going to look good on screen. Then, a network or studio has to pick up the show, and then they have to order more episodes, and then people have to watch it. It could be the greatest thing on television that nobody ever watches.
Remember, I'm someone who got fired from Disney and eight days later started the first studio in 65 years with two of the most brilliant, successful people in the history of the entertainment business, doing something everyone said was somewhere between improbable and impossible. I'm afraid that's exactly what I love doing.
I thought I'd do everything on four-track, and then I'll record every instrument myself in a studio, and then I'll have a solo album released by spring.
If we were truly in the studio making a record, it would have been more time consuming, and certainly I would have been more involved in the writing process.
I have a rough idea when I walk into a studio though.
A lot of actors said they hated the studio system, but I loved it. It was like a college; it was a great place to learn.
Wintertime for me is a time when I do a lot of my writing in the studio. It's a time I enjoy. And it's very reflective and a very calming time of the year. Throughout the year I gather a lot of musical inspirations, and this is where I bring them to the studio and see what will evolve musically.
Well, I just think through your career you go through different phases, and I just got sort of uninspired by the whole studio process of making and releasing films.
I used to sit near Marilyn Monroe in the Actor's Studio. She'd get dressed up because that was her identity. Sad. Those cameras wouldn't leave her alone. She didn't know where to hide.
I'm a big micro manager; I'm a stickler about organisation; everything needs a place, a purpose, and micro managing myself even when I'm in the studio.
I got into the studio when I was thirteen. At the age of twelve I was doing public performances.
It's interesting: John Calley at Warner Bros. helped me put 'Alice' together. It was very unusual back then for a studio to support an actress the way he backed and supported me. He even asked me if I wanted to direct the film, which I didn't feel prepared to at that point.
When I left the band I said Look, I am ready to move on. I was interested in playing with some of the other people that I had bee a studio musician with.
My home studio is my private instrument for me only. It's not intended to record anyone but me.
Most songs I write are spur-of-the-moment-type things. I have to be spontaneous. If not, songwriting can bore me. There is no pre-design or idea of what I am going to do when I go into the studio. It's all like that for me. I could go in and write two or three songs in an eight-hour session. You can't over-think songs. You just can't.
I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.
My cameraman and I devised a method, which we started using from my second film, which applies mainly to day scenes shot in the studio, where we used bounced light instead of direct light. We agreed with this thing of four or five shadows following the actors is dreadful.
The thing with me. I can't stick musicians. I've thought about this. I can't stand them, and being stuck in a studio with them I think that's my strength I can hear what they can't.
We're gonna release a studio album probably a year from now and we've got these recordings that we did with Coco Taylor and Johnny Johnson, who was Chuck Berry's piano player.
I'm right on the edge of getting another movie. It's between me and a famous person. The studio said they're thinking about going with somebody with a name. I said, 'That's great! Because I have one!'
When you see people who are really good at game shows, the one common attribute is a cool head under pressure: an ability to perform as well in the studio, surrounded by lights and noise, as you do on your couch.
One does afford oneself the luxury to come into the studio and all day, every day, spend one's life making aesthetic propositions. What an immense luxury.
It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.
