Ray Davies Quotes

It's very easy in the studio to get overzealous with your vocal takes, thinking, 'Oh yeah, I can do it over and over. I can sing at the top of my range for this whole song.' But when you're doing it every night on the road, it's pretty intense.

And the general opinion is we are much better on stage than in the studio.

Being in a recording studio is a very different feel from performing onstage. I mean, obviously, you can't just go in and do what you would do onstage. It reads differently.

The real test of a musician is live performance. It's one thing to spend a long time learning how to play well in the studio, but to do it in front of people is what keeps me coming back to touring.

The hits always wind up being the songs with big, high choruses. They're the ones too high to sing every night - not that you'll ever, ever hear me complain about having to try.

I love using lots of different pedals in the studio because you have the time to experiment with sounds. But when you're singing, fronting a rock band, and playing, you don't really want to have to think about a lot of that stuff.

I feel, in my live shows, I can be as dynamic as I want. It's my comfort zone. When I get in the studio, it's more of a solitary experience, which can be good creatively.

I think there's an attitude these days that you can go straight from a studio to the stage, and it isn't really like that. But playing live was the most important thing for me at the start because whenever I recorded something, it didn't sound right; I didn't like how my voice sounded. It was just raw.

When you play to an audience, you come away energized. It's the promo that really breaks an artist. Some lad sitting on a box trying to create a drum sound in a dry little studio. Everyone goes, 'Great - okay, now on with my day.' You go back to the bus, and you weep.

It's always important for us to record, so if we're not performing live, that's what we're doing.

You can't go back and edit during the live set in the club. In the studio it's different.

I'd say recording and playing on stage are two completely different things. Being up in front of all people is like jumping off a cliff into icy water. The recording process is a totally different energy.

With 'A Million Miles,' I still was proving myself as a writer and as a vocalist. It gave me the platform to tour again.

In the old days, all the movie songs were recorded right there on set.

We want to be able to make our own songs and write our own arrangements. We want to incorporate the live sound so we can be free onstage and in the studio recording. That way we can come up with original and creative stuff.

I watched my idol and fellow Dutchman Tiesto. He was the first DJ to play live on stage at an Olympic event - the Opening Ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens. At eight years old, all I can remember thinking was, 'I want to be a DJ.'

I love playing live and creating these records that people are so into.

Everything I do on stage, I made up in saloons. I started doing it in front of people, and that became my performance. I never had writers.

The best way to use the auto-tune is not to! And that's what I do: I do not use auto-tune!

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.

If you mess up the performance on stage, you do it again the next night. You're like alright, you let yourself off the hook, and you've got to go back in there. Whereas, with a film, I would go home and be like, "Well, I've ruined the arc of the character forever. That scene is never going to work. I know because I can never shoot it again." So, it's all miserable, but in different ways.

When I do my solo concerts, I'm used to being on the stage for two hours solid, singing 16 songs. And when I did 'Funny Thing,' I was on the stage the whole time. This is much more difficult. It's the difference between racing and sprinting. This is sprinting. And I have to learn to pace myself.

I love performing live, especially when I get in the zone. But the studio is really becoming a place I have grown to love.

The Beatles realized that what they were making in the studio could never be performed. And they had already given up on performing because there were too many screaming fans and they were playing in larger and larger venues so they couldn't even hear what they were playing, it just wasn't any fun any more.

Every time I go out on a stage I consider myself very lucky. Because, in a time where people are economically thinking about what to go and see - so, when I am on a stage, and it doesn't matter where I am, that's my favorite show. I come home after and say "That was my favorite show".