Natalie Merchant Quotes

Every project is different. When I'm working on my albums, I've worked with different producers and they've all had different personalities. The recording studio sets the vibe, and that changes as well.

We have recorded songs on the same day that were released years later in other albums.

Albums, with me, have never had an easy birth. Especially when all the songs are self-written songs.

When I'm writing my album, it's totally my world. Even though it's myself and another producer creating the project, Conceptually it's more under my power and on my own terms. At the same time, it's a different type of pressure because I'm ultimately speaking, I'm solely responsible for the end result.

Maybe you play a melody twice. You play it once like you like it, and some parts that you don't like you can just switch. An eight-bar motive - you can just take it and put it in the front or back or something like that. It can save you 50 or 60 or 70,000 dollars, a drum machine. That's why everybody uses it.

You're collaborating with people you don't even know, when you're making a film. You're collaborating with people you've never seen. So, the collaborative process is very, very different than when you're collaborating on a record with the musicians you've worked with all your life.

I'm always going forward toward something, and that something is usually an album, because I like to record. I probably like to record more than I like to write.

A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you.

We were all kind of freaked out recording the first album because we didn't know what it would be like.

An album is a project with which you have to hit hard.

One of those things that I find hard to dispose of is my attitude to album sequencing, the layout of the pieces.

It's a different thing when you go into a studio and you record with the intent of going somewhere and you're marketing yourself for that direction.

When I start working on a new album, I kind of stop listening to a lot of outside stuff just so I can kind of focus.

Human After All was the music we wanted to make at the time we did it. We have always strongly felt there was a logical connection between our three albums, and it 's great to see that people seem to realize that when they listen now to the live show.

When I was done with the movie [Ordinary World], I felt really compelled to start working on another album. Little did I know, they were going to come out back to back.

Yeah. It's all in the music first. The music is like women to me. It's like how you pick your music: everybody got their own different way how they pick their women and their music, and I guess that's what the album becomes.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

When I left the Beatles, I made an album called McCartney that I played everything on. And it was kind of a cool experience. I felt like a professor in a laboratory, just crafting stuff and adding this, and putting this on and moving the microphone, and it was very homemade.

A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you. So it does sometimes turn into a situation where you're saying to the person you're working with, "Well, what do you want?" But then there are other times when I work with people and they'll turn to me and say, "How do you want to do this?" And that's actually when I work best.

If you don't have an album or you don't have any tune, you can't start.

One thing Jay z told me that always sticks with me, is that, the album is never how you viewed it to be.

Every album is difficult. If it was easy, we'd make one a month.

You go in and record and sing them some and you go back in and rerecord and sing them some more. That's kind of how I did this album [The Art of Elegance].

But we're still rehearsing and planning to make a new album next year. We have some really good new songs that we've already been playing on that last tour that we just finished.

I think making an album is a difficult thing.