Mike D Quotes

I play music from Queen, to Elton John, to classic.

'Firepower' is the eighteenth full-length studio album for Judas Priest. That's a lot of metal songs over the decades, and the writing process is always the same, really.

I'm no stranger to making timeless music.

The thing people forget about Kevin Shirley a lot of the time is that he's not only a great producer, he's also a world-class engineer. He really knows how to get a sound.

I want to be known simply as a producer who makes music.

I never complete a song until I'm actually going to make a record.

See, there's only two theaters, man that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting and all that - the Fillmore and The Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country.

The Ramones couldn't play in my key. They couldn't switch keys, so Ed Stasium literally had to play all the instruments for my version of "Rock 'N' Roll High School," and I always thought that was so weird, because it's not the Ramones playing. It's the producer, who happened to just be a musician and could play everything.

Technology is 50% of rock 'n' roll - the magic, the art, the performance. If you don't have good technicians and a strong road crew who are devoted and believe in you and protect you, you're totally naked.

We don't want any vocalist messing up the music.

What excites me is the idea of doing a record that's pretty clean and focused on songs. I've rushed a lot with previous albums and there's not a rush now - it's not a race.

I came upon Diana Krall's jazz arrangement of "A Case of You" several years back. I've always wanted to pay homage to both her version and Joni's, and by proxy, my mom. She's the one that introduced me to that music.

There's a million things that come through when you put songs together and it's kind of difficult to pinpoint exactly what triggers it on every occasion. It's just like somebody writing a screenplay or something like that.

People talk about Frank Sinatra all the time - and they should talk about Frank - but he had the greatest arrangers. They worked for him in a different kind of way than they worked for other people. They gave him arrangements that are just sublime on every level. And he, of course, could match that because he had this ability to get inside of the song in a sort of a conversational way. Frank sang to you, not at you, like so many pop singers today. Even singers of standards.

Onstage I like to play with a an 18-inch speaker, which very few bass players do. I need that fat, underneath sound, which I've always had. It suits me admirably to do it like that, and I can imitate that sound by plugging directly into the board in the studio.

[Patrick Leonard] is such a magnificent composer. I don't think there is anybody working today with those kind of skills that could translate one of my tunes into that really beautiful chamber music.

The rest of the songs on the album [Mortal City ] have spare arrangements on them. Steve [Miller], really loved that. He'd just come off of a project with someone who basically had to mask the fact that there were no songs there with production. He said, "Oh, my God, you have real songs here!"

A lot of times I use live musicians, but I don't want it to have that live funky sound so I'll just take the best loop of a drum part and repeat it over and over and over again so that there's consistency and it feels a little bit more programmed. But I have a love/hate relationship with comping as well.

The really pop country stuff can sound a little bland because they put in strings and horns and all of that.

The play is really a kind of nightmare. It ought to flow rapidly and effortlessly from one moment to another. In London, we had difficulty with the set, which required too much effort to move around. Having gotten the benefit of seeing it done once, I wanted to work on the script, to make it sharper and more pointed.

Very often the music comes first.

We rehearsed for two weeks [in "Fences"], and we taped out the whole house in the front, and the rooms, and we stood it up like a play. We tried to get off book and gave people small props.

As a musician, you write and make music as you go. It's definitely in a great sequence. When you release songs, you think, "Let me make sure this goes with this so it's like a story."

I don't want any production credit. I think producers are overrated. They're for people who, first of all, don't know anything about music or arranging and have no ear for their own doings. They can't tell a good solo from a bad solo, stuff like that.

There's so much more subtlety to this new recording. There's a subtlety in the playing. There's also a subtlety in the way I approached the singing. The band was able to really capture the feeling of the songs and not really trade anything that we had sort of arranged for the live presentation, but the songs just aren't as loud.