I spent two weeks prancing around a studio in Queens in my underwear with nine other guys. They were long days. But what the hell, it was Calvin Klein.
It's nice because success has allowed me to have a blast on stage, to be in the studio with amazing people, but I find it all a bit bizarre.
I invited a group of students to my studio to expose them to both the creative and business sides of the fashion industry. It was fun because the group was so bright and full of curiosity. They asked really challenging questions about all aspects of the business and absorbed so much information so quickly.
I started off as a studio pianist in Hollywood.
We still have that same burn, to get that same kind of laughs. So whether the studio wants us to or not, we're going to do it. The money is just a byproduct of coming out with good stuff. Our whole thing is building that rapport with the audience.
When a movie is about to come out on its initial debut, there are a lot of people involved - the financiers, the studio and the producers and also, many times, the foreign distributors. So it is a time of tremendous pressure and uncertainty.
Terry said he had this new kid and his wife didn't want to live in England. He wanted to tour. He hated being in the studio. Terry liked seeing various bars the world over and getting smashed out of his brain. He was a sort of latent Keith Moon.
I have nothing against these big CGI movies, but there are not enough of the other ones - the ones with stories about character that have a beginning, a middle and an end. I said that to a couple of studio heads and they said, 'That's novel.'
A while ago, I was starting to get bored with my routine, so I tried Spinning and fell in love with it instantly. I go to class three times a week, without fail. I always get there early so I can sit in the front of the studio, and I'm ready to go as soon as the instructor comes in.
For me, living and making music, they're one thing. It's not like a job that I go to a studio to do, or a chore that I have to get myself in the mood to do, or something. It's the thing that I need to do every day.
I've been in enough films where the studio wanted that extra little cuteness to make it sellable.
The 'Aladdin' thing - that's not work; that's just fun. Three days in the recording studio going mad, then the animators do all the work. Not a bad way to cash a large check, my friend.
I hate going out for lunch during a workday because it slows down my pace and ruins my rhythm. I prefer to eat at my desk. Actually, I wander around the design studio with a plate in my hand as I dine on, for example, salmon sashimi and a salad of tomatoes and mozzarella. I often have a bit of dark chocolate after lunch.
I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.
I enjoyed so much working with the guys from Wilco, and riffing off of them, and having someone come up to me with ideas, because normally in the studio it's me who has to come up with all the ideas.
It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time.
I had a really good time working with Jim Cameron. A lot of people didn't, but I did as I got on with him really quite well. For a director who spends most of his time looking down a lens or in the digitisation studio or working out some graphics, he is actually very good with actors.
I don't use any real vintage hardware any longer. That's always been the object as far as gaining control of the studio environment, going back to when I built my first studio, Secret Sound, in New York City. The whole point was to not have to pay studio bills anymore and not be looking at the clock.
There's just a lot of really young, entitled people. I don't think a lot of these young people have to work very hard. They're found on YouTube and, boom, thrown into the studio, so they think they can get anything they want.
I worked three and then six hours a day in my studio with strict discipline and emotion. I obtained awards usually granted to other foreigners during the end-of-year admission tests.
Carefully execute every instruction given to you by the director, producer, and studio. But that would be a life not worth living.
Often, equipment can as easily function as a security blanket for musicians unwilling or unable to risk anything personal in the studio. Whether one catches the feeling on a record is a subjective matter. How can you be sure? The machinery can hold out the promise of at least mechanical perfection.
I played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen's fairs, policemen's balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I'd seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio.
I didn't connect with the kids. I was in the studio. I never saw the kids. I hoped they liked it, of course. And then I'd go write some more. And then I'd go buy me a home. Very American.
I never saw myself so much as an actor. I wanted to be a cartoonist like Charles M. Schulz and create my own world and be able to have a studio at home and not commute and be able to be with my family.
I think I was very lucky to have grown up with an artist's studio in the house. It was a kind of life that was possible. Yeah, it made it kind of harder because the standards were higher, but there was no pressure.
You've got these big studio films and these tiny independent films now. It's very much either/or. With the independent films, it's always a beautiful risk - it might never be seen. With the studio films, you're conforming to the formula of what's always been in place.
So whenever I had some in-between producing time down in my studio I popped a tape in and started working on it. Working a little bit at a time, it actually took almost four years.
Normally, you go into the recording studio, make a record and then take it on the road and you think... wow... I could have done THIS to it, or something.
I was in the studio so much, it was about the search for air in a metaphoric sense, and the breathing has more to do with travel for me, about the search musically for open air.
From George Martin's classically inspired production of the Beatles to Peter Gabriel's early solo masterpieces, to Stereolab's beautiful loops and blips, U.K.-based bands have often found a way to squeeze warmth and compassion from the stone-cold - especially now that the tubes are gone - machinery of the recording studio.
When I go in the studio, I put myself into a place where I'm feeling something I want to portray, which is often being sad, lonely. But as soon as I'm starting to make something, it's when I'm the happiest. Ever. I think that comes out at the same time, so there's that juxtaposition.
I am always locked in my design studio.
I'm a little more comfortable in that role. I love being in the studio.
At any one time, I'll have 30 to 40 pieces going on in the studio, so this is not economically driven at all.
I like rock music because it's always sonically fascinating. There's never a method to what it needs to sound like. It's just however that instrument comes out that day, whatever the humidity level was in the air, what studio you were at. All that makes that tone that you can't re-create, so each song is like a person.