I'm insane, I'm emotional, but I'd rather be that than a robot. So that's definitely something that I wanted to get out there. Especially with Cry Baby's story, because the album is about Cry Baby but I realized that me and her went through the same change.
So like what I want to do is connect all of my albums and make it tell a bigger kind of story. So the first album is very focused on her family life and her love life.
I definitely listened to Lauryn Hill - her's was like the first album I bought myself. Brandy's Never Say Never and Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill were always in rotation for a couple of years.
Obviously, this is our first album [Begin], so this is our first big body of work that's out there in the world and it really represents our journey, from where we started to now and all the music we created, our range, and all the things that we definitely shared, but weren't able to show our range on a full-scale until this album.
My first album was called Seven Waves, and was directly inspired by the ocean, and the ocean has been a leitmotif in my music. Nature was my inspiration even in NYC, because I needed that balance - I would travel out to nature. I loved the big city, I loved the energy, but I needed the balance.
When a friend puts out a new album and it's really great, it makes you want to do something that great and it makes you get yourself in gear. It's healthy competition that helps make some great music.
I think that the creative process, especially in the beginning of making an album, I'm feeling very fragile, so to speak, because you are trying out so many different ideas, and if you are listening to it from the outside, it would sound horrible!
I've had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn't really require you to sit down and work out what the story's about. You're brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it's kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It's taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.
I can't wait until the record label feels like it's time for my album to come out, and then just disappear.
I think you have to drop an album to truly see the effects of your following.
Producing a film is more unfamiliar territory. Although producing an album and overseeing artists is a task within itself. But film is unfamiliar territory so, here and now, that's more difficult.
You ask a person what their personal favorite song on the album is, and it's literally the one with the least amount of listens if you looked at the statistics of it.
I was reading a Time magazine interview with an author named Brené Brown. She said, "People that fail seem to ultimately do the same thing they think works over and over again." I had an epiphany and called my manager and started a creed with my producers. I promised we'd do whatever was best for the song and the album - no ego would get in the way.
I met Quincy [Jones], he had heard my album, someone played the album and he flipped over it.
In 1975,Bob Dylan was almost 10 years past his prime - and then he released the best album of his career, Blood on the Tracks. Written and recorded amid a painful divorce, Blood on the Tracks is proof that heartbreak makes great art - just as many of the albums that followed were the opposite.
The confessional singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s was in full swing, and Bob Dylan's emotional album [ Blood on the Tracks] resonated with the times. There would be other hits, but never the same alchemy of emotion and time.
[Bob] Dylan's many quotations from classic American roots music (that song is from an album aptly titled Love and Theft) join the aging poet to a tradition that preceded him and hopefully will outlive him as well.
I work with this wonderful five-piece band, The Tony Guerrero Quintet, along with Kate Flannery, who was Meredith the Drunk in The Office, and Tim Davis, who was the vocal arranger on Glee. The three of us sing, and the band is amazing. We've been working together for about two years. So, we decided to do a Christmas album in July.
I'm a lot different in my career since that interview. To have someone like Diplo tweet "Cakes' album is really cool" is cool, but in the same breath I still like what I do without anyone's approval. It's still good music.
I've been working with Peaches for a while as far as doing shows, maybe for the past two years. Everyone else seems to think that this is a new relationship, but me and her have been touring off and on for a while now. I was doing my album and I needed that heavy-hitter.
To be honest, we're really nervous right now. It's our third album, so it's gotta be our best and biggest.
This time, we went up to Big Bear for 3-4 weeks and sequestered ourselves writing this album [ "The Black Crown"].
The album [Blaxistential crisis] artwork is by a friend of mine who is a brilliant artist named Sara Pocock. We've been friends for a couple of years and she worked with me on the animation. I believe she's still working over at BuzzFeed.
I would love to make an album full of ballads. For a listener, I want to have variety on there.
You go in and record and sing them some and you go back in and rerecord and sing them some more. That's kind of how I did this album [The Art of Elegance].
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