DJ Premier Quotes

Artists tend to get this thing called demo-itis, and I'm extremely guilty of that.

I used to play works in progress to people, but now I wait 'til it's finished, because you make excuses all the time: 'Well, there's gonna be an orchestra on it.' Rather than make excuses, wait 'til it's finished, and then they can say they don't like it.

I tend to write and record things quite quickly. You can tamper with things for years, and it's artistic laziness sometimes.

It's true, most of my days are spent alone in a dark room! I don't really want anyone to see me trying and failing to nail the 40th take of a simple piano cue.

When I listen to my own records, I always think, 'Oh, I could have sung that so much better.' But you have to finish something and turn it in. If I didn't have folks who say, 'Come on, we need the record now,' I probably would never finish one.

Songs seem to take me a long time. I don't know why; they're not especially excellent for taking so long.

The music I make, it's so hard. I listen to it 100,000 times before it even drops.

As a band, we always took a really long time to make records, so unfortunately, we got into that habit of, like, 'We'll work on it tomorrow.'

It's like... to make a good record - I don't care who you are - it takes a long time and a lot of passion and a lot of attention to detail, right?

I think one of the pitfalls of doing your own music is that sometimes you can never be satisfied with it: you're afraid to say that it's done, and you keep reworking it or re-recording it or re-writing it.

I spent a lot of time preparing for releasing music and then not a lot of time releasing music.

I can make something for a long time and just not come up with an ending. It's finishing things that I don't enjoy.

I wasn't letting people in with the music writing process, and for a long time, I thought I was hard to work with.

The hardest part for me is to finish a track. I start new projects all the time.

I labour over details and whether a song should be a straight pop song form or exploratory. This is the curse with doing things by yourself.

I'm a beat hoarder. I'll record five songs in a year and I still hoard beats.

You don't get any mixtapes, you know, 'cause I don't like my voice in there. I want to be that, but that's just not me, you know. And I'm very impatient; if I don't do it right, I'll be like, well, 'Ok that's the best I'm gonna do it.' Because I feel like if you take too much time on something, you lose the motivation for it.

Finishing a song is definitely the hardest part. It's, you know, you can polish it forever and then whittle it down into something it wasn't and be like, "I need to build it back up," which is why some tracks have 400 versions. But I guess you know when it's done when...I have a maximalist approach to sound when I can't find any more space to put new sounds.

I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.

I always knew I wanted to do music, but it took me a long time to figure out how to exactly do that. With my first record deal, everything kinda fell apart. I wasn't ready for it, I didn't know how to handle the business side at all. I thought as soon as I got a record deal, everything would fall into place and I wouldn't have to really do any work anymore. I could just make music, and be successful. Well that was not the case and everything fell apart for a period of time.

You're not going to hit it every single time, and that's why, when I record an album, I do probably close to 50 songs. Each song I record has to get better. If it's not better than the last song that I made, it'll usually linger for a couple of months, and then it'll be put on the backburner, and then there'll be another song that I do, and then it often doesn't make it on the album.

It takes me a lot of time, and it's almost frustrating for the guys sometimes because they're waiting for a new song. And I - it's just so important for me to get the perfect, exact, right song.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

I'm always working on my own music, too. I've been working on a record for a few years.

It's just hard when you've spent so much time on something, writing and recording, laying the vocals, getting the hook right, getting the beat right, making everything sound right - you spent a freaking week trying to make it sound perfect, and someone comes along and shoots it down.