Tom Stoppard Quotes

I'm thinking about recording everything to tape like it's 1991 and seeing how that sounds.

If I have an idea, I write it down, although I usually carry a little dictation machine with me because I'm too lazy to write.

After about fourth grade, I do remember borrowing my mother's old portable Olivetti and typing stories out on the back of photocopies of journal articles.

The only things that are a little bit newer are the CD burners, but we hid them under the table, so basically we had the feeling we were somewhere completely different, in another time.

Back when I was jamming with Axl and the guys they had boxes of cassettes with song ideas. How do you know which ones you like now when you have that many ideas.

I've been combing through the Wolverine archives and advertisements from the sixties and seventies. I'm looking to take inspiration from designs of the past and bring them into the future.

Every record I've ever done with Tool has been on tape.

I got offered to do a book yeah, and they said to me, 'Gem, you're so busy, how about we get someone to walk around with you with a dictaphone,' and that's how we did it.

People keep inventing all these new machines, and producers and recording engineers keep wanting to use them.

I used to just scribble things on a piece of paper whenever an idea would - came to mind. Now with cell phones. It definitely has gotten a lot easier because I can just take it out and just - I'll just sing into my phone.

When I was really young, I was using VHS tapes to record.

I know some bands that are precious about their new ideas. They're conscious of the fact that people can - even from mobile phones - begin to get clearer and better recordings of the songs... so they're a lot more hesitant to play them.

Lyrically, I've always thought about albums as a record of a period of time.

After my second No. 1, my record company, Warner Brothers, gave me a beautiful present - quite unique at the time - one of the very first Sony stereos which had speaker and radio included so I could record the radio and build up cassette tapes of music, gospel singing, adverts, evangelists.

I think it goes back to me being a recording mixer and engineer. Because of all the technology now you can make music yourself and a lot of people are doing that now. I started out doing that a long time ago and I found when I did that I came up with a unique sound.

When I was younger, I'd be walking down the street and suddenly panic because I had a cool idea and no way of getting it down - I'd have to sing it all the way home. Now I can hum it into my phone.

I've been sort of writing sketches for songs on my own forever and putting them down on cassette tapes. Yet for years and years and years, my main songwriting outlet was as a member of Sonic Youth, and for most of our time together, our best songs were written in a group setting, where the four of us were getting together in a room.

Technology has very little to do with what I do. I have a purpose built studio but all I need for writing is my piano and a cassette recorder as I still use cassettes.

I'm a fan of writing, and writing letters, because I hate when I'm trying to get a thought out, and I can't.

I called it 'Historian' because I feel like most of my creative efforts are efforts to capture something or to document it.

A CD is only a snapshot of the songs at a given time.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

When you create stuff, you're always going to be progressing and where you're at a year down the line, as the creator, it's always going to feel immature. You're going to notice the flaws and the things that you've learned in that year aren't going to be there. So, I think it's important to see stuff as a capture of time - that's what I was doing at that time - and not be ashamed of it. That's how I try to approach music.

Sometimes you have the feeling that some little imp is standing behind you and dictating to you, but he gives it to you slowly, drop by drop.

I wrote a play before that and it never saw the light of day. And then I started working on this play and it came out really quickly. Eventually I got it, and I wrote a letter to Sarah Jessica Parker and she wanted to do it. So that's how it happened.