Rivers Cuomo Quotes

I just think that any person who wants music to be their career shouldn't focus on a record label. I have seen friends who sign to a label too early in their career, and they lost control over their music, and their releases were delayed or never put out.

I am not going to be dictated to by fans, certainly. I am dictated enough to by my record company to last me a million years.

If I could have stayed independent from the jump, then, maybe, things would have been different. 'Return of 4Eva' would have been an album instead of a mixtape.

I've been offered things from alot of different labels and stuff like that, but it's just like, it has to be perfect. I'm not going to sign my life away.

The big, big record labels have so much control. I think too much control that it actually made their artists scared to not do what they were told and then the music suffers because of that dynamic and now there's the power of the download.

The big labels have less of a stranglehold on artists and how they record and where they go.

Because I'm not in a record deal, I don't have to operate in an album format.

I find it so funny how people that don't write the music, and have no involvement in it, can make such huge decisions on behalf of artists.

You don't need a record company to turn you into anything.

We had a nightmare on our first album, and went through two producers. I decided, on the second album, to take the money that we were supposed to use for pre-production, and we went into a studio and cut the album with no producer. We finished the whole thing without telling the record company.

The American record company Geffen got so fed up with me that they said they weren't going to release my fourth record unless I gave it some title. So it was called 'Security' in America, and it had no title everywhere else in the world.

With my previous record deal, it'd be like, 'OK, so I have this track then, EMI - do you know any singers, maybe? Do you have any singers on your little label there?' And funnily enough, they didn't. But I prefer finding unknown singers myself anyway.

I had to beg to get out of my contract with Capitol. They wanted me to work with big producers. I wanted to produce my music, and they weren't having that. I'm sure they were happy to let me go. I just didn't want to do what they wanted me to do.

I really don't want to put more than a couple of records out a year, and I think that makes sense - on an artistic level, but also for my label.

I was never your average artist, happy to do whatever the record company told me.

When you are signed to a major label, everyone wants to have a say in who you are and what you are doing.

Four months after we released 'I Don't Want to Be Funny Anymore,' the album came out on EggHunt. Three months after that, we officially signed with Matador. That's not a very long time: half a year between the first flood and the final signing.

You can be more creative when you're not feeling like a slave. When you're on a record label, they have you like that.

The record label used to try and make us do stuff, like dance, and we'd say, nah, not doing that.

I don't want to release a CD; I want to release the real deal, so we're just gonna take our time.

Being a pop-leaning, female artist, you'd think that I'd have my record company breathing down my neck and trying to control everything I'm doing. Actually, they've just kind of let me take the wheel.

I got out of the business because I went from being the biggest artist on my record label to someone they didn't even want to have around.

It's a great feeling being with a label that respects what I do.

You no longer have to have a big record label behind you and have to kowtow to the politics that enabled you to get there. You can be a phenomenal artist and put your stuff out there on YouTube and find yourself becoming a star.

Nobody really produces my albums.