Adam Young Quotes

I just make the music feel the way I want it to feel, and I don't put it out until I'm totally happy with it.

I labour over details and whether a song should be a straight pop song form or exploratory. This is the curse with doing things by yourself.

I'm not interested so much in collaboration. You see that from the history of my albums.

I don't believe in making a record and rushing it.

Producing all my own songs and refusing to go to the hot producer. That's the biggest risk I've taken so far.

I've never stopped making new music, and whether the audience wants to hear it or not, I'm going to play it. Because I'm an artist, and I create, and I've got new stuff.

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.

I've never had anybody produce my records. I've always produced my own records. I've worked with a guy for a while who was an engineer who helped me produce records, but I've always made my own records. I'm a control fanatic. I've got to control everything.

Working with other people, it's hard to get them to make it sound like what you have in mind. Also, it's really expensive to get your tracks produced, so I thought if I could learn how to do it myself, I could make five albums in a month and it would be free, it would be me, and it would be everything that I'm doing.

I'm writing for the sake of writing music. Whether it gets heard or not isn't an issue for me. It keeps my own juices going and my mind active.

I recorded a lot of songs that I knew I didn't like just because maybe part of me wanted to be nice, maybe part of me just wanted to be in the studio, but I've been learning that it's really important to do what you want to do. Even though I might not write all of it, I am still picking out the songs that I want to do. A lot of people who are writing for me are people I have worked with for a while so they know who I am and what I want. I have a lot of opinions and I have learned that it is absolutely okay to express them and to say, "No, I don't want this."

I put a lot into my records, and I won't release anything I'm not totally thrilled with.

Obviously, with creating music you are solely responsible for the creation of it.

I'm a soul maker. I write songs. I'm making cartoon shows. I'm planning on putting stuff out myself on my own, on a TV station online. I'm not limiting myself. I'm doing it all at once.

I had an opportunity to make an album - that was a dream come true. I had to make sure that I could do it the best way I could, and at least at the end of it be very pleased with it and not regret anything. So that took a lot of concentration. Being isolated really helps with that.

When I'm making my music, I'm writing it, I'm producing it, I'm playing all the instruments, I'm performing. It's my own world where I do what I feel, and nobody tells me anything.

When I look at commercial studios, I think, "Oh, they're all so nice and tidy," but it's because they don't actually write music in them.

When you write a novel or paint a picture, you have the opportunity to approach it and back off, tear up pages, write, rewrite, paint over, and come back to it. In film, once you start shooting, you can't restart the clock, and you keep moving forward, and you don't look back, and you don't go back. And that is, of course, antithetical to the creative process. It's really hard to generate a comfortable creative flow under that kind of pressure.

I'm one dude that writes his adlibs. I don't just go in there and say "Gimme a track." I say what I'ma say here [then] I put effects on my voice. Why not? I wrote it. Why not show the talent? Why be scared? That's why I hate certain fans who hate cause it's not like raw hip-hop, like boom bap.

There's not like a science to it, necessarily, but I'm also the kind of person who spends a long time in the studio. I will spend my entire advance just getting it done, which is probably stupid, but I don't have extravagant taste. I mean, I paid for it, so there you go. Why not? The recording process is also very fun.

I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them. Finally the Foo Fighters stuff happened when I just went to the studio down the street from my house and recorded some stuff in about five or six days, and all these people wanted to release it as an album. I wanted to release it on my own, with no photos and no names on it.

I think now that I've tried directing, I'm not interested in doing adaptations anymore. I could do an adaptation of someone else's work that I would write, but the idea of taking someone else's material entirely doesn't interest me. One of the things that I found really helpful, at least in my mind - and I've never discussed this with the actors or with the people I work with - is that being a neophyte in directing, I feel like I have a kind of authority simply because I'm the writer as well.

The world has changed a lot since I started making records.I used to go into a studio and there were songs there, chosen for me to see if I liked them. I wasn't encouraged to write.

I've always been scared of somebody telling me what to do with my music. What if a great acting opportunity came up, and they were like, "No. You have to go tour and open up for this band," that I'm just not that crazy about? I made a decision a long time ago that I'm doing it because I love it, because it's fun. If I break even, that's a good thing.

It's just hard when you've spent so much time on something, writing and recording, laying the vocals, getting the hook right, getting the beat right, making everything sound right - you spent a freaking week trying to make it sound perfect, and someone comes along and shoots it down.