Robert Palmer Quotes

After 'Mosaic,' I think a lot of people didn't know what my next record was going to be. And that's what I love. I just love doing music because I'm not going to follow the patterns and formulas of Music Row.

Once you're successful with a certain kind of music, it's hard not to have faith in it as a means to stay successful.

As an artist, you have to express yourself. I make no excuses for my versatility. I grew up singing classical arias, but I love rock n' roll and jazz standards.

I don't know if I would qualify as mainstream. I think I have managed to function pretty successfully on the fringes of the music world and have been able to play exactly what I have wanted the way I have wanted.

There's no pressure for me to go out there and say, I've got to have a top 40 hit because it's not going to happen.

I love all types of music. Jazz, classical, blues, rock, hip-hop. I often write scripts to instrumentals like a hip-hop artist. Music inspires me to write. It's either music playing or completely silent. Sometimes distant sound fuels you. In New York there's always a buzzing beneath you.

Several record companies had rejected my song 'Owner of A Lonely Heart' on the grounds it was 'too left field.' I never create to make a hit just to satisfy some record company executive's quarterly profit statement.

I don't like working with hitmakers. I don't want hits! You're not even allowed to say that word around me.

I love radio, but it's a very limited thing today. Everything has to be edited down to 3:59, and too bad if I didn't make my statement in three minutes and 59 seconds. Everybody's song has to make its point so quickly.

I have cut four albums so far, and all of them have been trendsetters and commercially successful. I believe that once you start taking art in commercial terms, it ceases to be art.

My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don't have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you'll be the richest.

If it came down to it, I wish people heard different records from me that I know give you a soul R&B sound of music that I know is really my gift, gift. But the ones that usually go are the records that radio, the fans and the clubs really love the most.

I think I deliberately sold out a couple of times. I picked the songs that I thought would do well in the marketplace, even though I didn't really love the song.

Everything about my life was culturally rich, and all the people I met sort of reinforced the wackiness that was normally inside of me. No one said, 'You can't do that,' until I got to real record companies, that is.

Most bands have a sound that they're already identified with, so for the producer it becomes a process of helping them find their muse in the studio to make a record that will not only satisfy them artistically, but will also do something in the marketplace.

Didn't Lionel Richie just make a country album? No one is giving him a hard time... and God bless him - I love Lionel and should be able to do what he wants to do, like Madonna should, too. Both are having success and I applaud them. If you don't like it, don't buy it. The ageism criticism is getting old.

If I start trying to make a record for what I think could possibly get played on radio, I'm dead.

I don't care about commercial success. I get to do what I love and communicate whatever I want.

Everybody used to be busy writing songs - great songs - that became hits. Now everybody's writing hits. Everybody's desperately writing a hit because they know they can't survive if they don't have a hit. Where in the past, we were writing a song like 'More Than Words' on a porch, not really believing it was gonna be a hit.

I suppose we'll make money off our album and our singles and stuff, but, like, they were made as we wanted them, exactly with what we had to say, and done exactly how we wanted them, right? And, like, we didn't put them out to make money. We put them out because we wanted to do them, do you know what I mean?

I lived at the greatest time in the history of mankind to be a musician.

We had to take full advantage of the fact that we wanted to be one of the most creative bands out there that's getting backed by one of the biggest companies.

All record companies want big-selling records, and my music is a little too raw for commercial success.

The success of the first album was almost an anomaly, and it could remain a fantastic anomaly. It was not crafted for commercial success. I remember meetings with my label saying it had no radio singles. For me, the second album was a gesture of independence.

As an artist, I don't care about where we are in the charts and all that. The important thing to me is to connect with a creative project.