Ray J Quotes

Musically, I wear many hats. I'm the social media director. I conceptualise the videos, write the songs, do the press. I'm not a major label act.

I'm just focusing on 'Let's Stay Together' and slowly building my production company. I'm trying to get into writing as well.

My relationship with Music Row has always been, from my end, optimistic and hopeful that there is more than one way to approach the writing, recording, and marketing of an album.

I wanted to produce Nancy LaMott's albums, so I created my own record company.

The end game is always a hit song.

I got about 6037 songs I wrote myself and I'm trying to get them on the market and I just wish people could hear them and stuff but they'll do pretty good.

I don't believe in the philosophy of stumbling across hit records.

There are certainly things labels can still provide that indie artists can't. They can pave the way to radio and pay big bucks for promotion.

Being a recording artist, selling music, selling concerts out, having a reality show, starting film; it's great, it's beautiful.

Motown's policy was to build one act at a time or their favorites.

A single is really quick, man. You can get it out, and in two months have it on your merch table. And albums can take a really long time. But when you get done with an album, it's a lot more fulfilling.

I'm never doing a new album. I'll probably do nothing but singles. I'm as good as anybody out there lyrically and conceptually and can go toe to toe with the best of them throughout history. But I don't know how much longer I'll be doing it. It's not really fun anymore.

I'm working on my new album right now. Hopefully to get that out at the top of 2005, January 2005.

'Boneless,' even though we were thinking about servicing it to radio, it made more sense putting a vocal on there. This was actually the first time that I really looked at doing a song for radio and kind of let go of some control and listened to a lot of different radio pluggers and had Ultra come in and help out with ideas.

Since I was 17, I had been just making records and promoting them.

When I do an album I try to find a producer that's excited about something that they want me to sing, and I check with the record company to find out what they think they can sell - which is their No. 1 priority.

I'm releasing a single. It's called 'Live it Up.' It was based on my Euro trip. I only write my own music. I don't let other people write it at all. So I've been working on that a lot. There's three singles coming out. The producer of The Fray who did their double-platinum album 'How to Save a Life,' I'm working with him. He's producing me.

I just want to keep saturating the market and radio with as many hit records as I can.

It used to be that if you had a pretty good record, you could stop by a station in Little Rock or Atlanta and let the DJ listen to it. No way something like that can happen now.

I've been a solo artist for a year now, and I think I should start thinking about the future now. Every spare time I get, I want to be in the studio and work on music for 2015. It's a lot of work.

Commercial success still hasn't come to an artist that isn't signed to a record label. There are very few artists that can succeed without the help of a record label. The role of the record label is still required, it's still necessary.

I will not promote other people's songs big time. I will just mention that I produced the song to get the credit I think I deserve.

I want to learn - there's so much I have to learn about what it takes to be a recording artist, about what it takes to go on tour.

When 'Hide Away' first started gaining a bit of momentum, I was visiting at least two radio stations per day - sometimes in different cities - to spread the word about the song. It was a hustle, but so worth it.

I have to write pretty songs; that's what gets them on the charts.