Rick Wakeman Quotes

I work very hard on getting the songs as direct and examined as I can before I go in the studio.

I love being in the studio, and I am a huge fan of live music. Without writing good stuff in the studio, you have nothing to play live.

I think it's his perception of knowing how to make a record build, keeping the integrity of the song in the music and really adding a lot of musical elements to compliment my voice and to compliment the song.

I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

There's not a lot of thinking that I need to do away from the studio on Broken Bells stuff.

It's a very organic process, and it has a specific order to it. I love to write, and once you've written, then you arrange. After the arrangement, you record it, and then you tour it.

There's always a group of songs that I'm working at. Some of them are 10 years old, and some of them are just a few weeks old. I'm always trying to adjust these songs to some position where I can bring them to completion.

My best capacity is to edit. If anything, I am a specialist at editing: my usual approach is to record a song very long. In the beginning just jam, jam on and on. Then break the song and play with it.

There's the drums, the music, the melodies, the lyrics, the production, the artwork: there are so many elements to making an album, and the drumming is just a very small fraction of what I focus on.

Usually, I write the music and am involved in the production.

Part of my growth as a producer was not just about making beats but also helping in the process of inspiring the song and making the song the center.

When I walked into the studio, the chorus of 'Nobody Love' was already set. For me, the challenge was to make it have depth.

Plus, we spend most of our time writing music. Most of the time is spent in the studio in my house.

I'm not really gonna stop. We've got so much stuff to do, so many songs we talked about, so many things to record.

You start to think in terms of making an album that might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's sort of like having a lot of footage and then editing it into something that will make sense to a viewer, you know. Sometimes it might involve even working on an older song that might complete that picture.

When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.

When a piece is done, I mix it before going on to any other piece.

I write the songs, go in and record them, then I listen to everything and decide how it all fits together.

'MMMBop' took about a year to actually get completed. The chorus idea had really been around for a long time, and then we built the song around it.

Putting together a hit record is like putting together a puzzle.

When I'm not on the road I'm in the studio every day.

I generally prefer to come in to the studio with a fully written song and then work on the arrangement with the band. Sometimes even the arrangements are pretty much already worked out in my head, but other times we experiment.

When you're producing, you're really just making a series of decisions.

We're always in the studio pretty much, either at home or on the road, trying to come up with new ideas and stuff.

When you make a record, you get to live in an imaginary world where you have the best kind of band on every song.