Dr. John Quotes

It's through working with a lot of first-time directors that I realized that people learn on their feet. Everybody works on something for a different reason. Everybody has got something new to learn on these sets, and you don't have to know everything, the second you start.

Going into my second film as a director, it's night and day of what it was like going into my first film. It doesn't matter what you know in your head and what you've been taught until you're there and doing it; it's a whole new ball game.

I'm still at the beginning of my career. It's all a little new, and I'm still learning as I go.

So I didn't have anything to do with picking the songs, but I got to musically take them in places I thought might be interesting, so it was a real neat collaboration among the three of us.

We spent a month in LA using a pool of musicians, a string arranger called Benjamin Wright, some great backing singers, and it gave tracks like Dynamite, which was written there, that kind of flavour.

We'll set up a demo session and try to knock out eight or ten songs and make them sound as close as we can to a record with the money and time we have.

The way I like to start a new project is to take a cover song and make a stab at it, ideally one that has nothing to do with the people in the room.

I was a terrible reporter. The only advantage was I made all my mistakes in a place and at a time where I didn't know anyone, but I literally made every mistake in the book.

Every album is unto itself, so whatever sounds we need to come up with, like way back when, we needed horns. So we invented the Lone Wolf Horns, and we learned how to play horns.

As you go through your career you learn what works for you and what doesn't and you pick things up with experience.

Unfortunately, the record I did with Motley wasn't exactly a huge success. But working with those guys was a huge learning experience as well as a really creative time, so I had an absolute blast during that five years of my life!

With the first 'Toy Story,' we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We'd never made a movie before, so we went down a lot of blind alleys along the way. We went through seven different writers before we finally settled into our groove.

Working with great actors - being part of something of that magnitude and not knowing the business and what the business entailed or any of that. I was so wet behind the ears, I didn't know anything. It's, like, you're watching movies, and then here you are in front of those people and working with them. It was pretty interesting.

I am a very big fan of Brian Eno, of his work as an artist and making his music, and as a producer. In some ways, I have looked to his career as a model for my own.

The debut film came much easier to me than it would have if I was an outsider.

I am getting to work with some good musicians, artistes, and composers.

Success came to me in my late 20s. I started touring when I was a teenager, so I had already seen the good, the bad, and the ugly side of the music business. Plus, setting up my own record company taught me a lot.

Experimenting is part of the process. I remember when I was younger, I spent a whole year just writing on straight trap beats because I just wanted to be able to do that at a high level. So it's about perfecting your craft in every way.

I'm into hiring smart guys; I'm into hiring guys who can think at a higher level, that can offer ideas.

It was immaterial to me that Elvis didn't write his own songs. Those were very different days, and he selected whatever suited him best from material supplied by publishing houses and teams of writers - all of whom were extremely conscious of his style of delivery.

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

It's extremely humbling to look around the astronaut office, see how much experience there is, see how many lessons there are to learn and it's truly starting at square one.

The fun for me musically is that you never quite know what works and why. So why pretend you do? Why not just put things together and discover, in the creative process, if and why they work? That approach has served me well.

I don't think I have a great voice, but I started singing on my tracks and they did a lot better. So I thought, 'let's give this a go then!'

Whenever we try something new, mistakes will happen. Seemingly good ideas will fail and need to be re-thought.