Album Creation Quotes

All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.

The thing about being an artist is that you evolve so quickly, you grow, you learn, you change, you find yourself hating work that you made months prior. That's the hard part about making an album, but every couple days I fall asleep listening to my album front to back and I lay there feeling so proud of what I did.

I couldn't have written things like 'Low' and 'Heroes,' those particular albums, if it hadn't have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

I want to make an album with just great beats and big vocals and just amazing lyrics.

I am working on current material, a new album, and that is all still my main motivation of going out and working. We haven't gotten rid of all the new stuff in favor of the old.

When it comes to making an album I take that very seriously. I am meticulous, overworked. That's my time to put everything under the microscope.

Tame Impala has two lives. One is the album, which is like a producer, and the other life is like a band: more of a live incarnation where we're basically a covers band for the albums that I produce.

I think somewhere in the back of my mind I've always wanted to make a whole swing album.

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.

My first album after 'American Idol' I did with Desmond - we paid for it together, and we literally were together working on it every day for a year and half, just writing. We wrote in New York, Nashville, L.A., Sweden - we wrote with some other amazing songwriters like Diane Warren, too.

What excites me is the idea of doing a record that's pretty clean and focused on songs. I've rushed a lot with previous albums and there's not a rush now - it's not a race.

A lot of times, when you record something, the album becomes less about the music and more technical.

I remember I heard it in an interview with Michael Jackson one day, saying the art is gone, everybody makes records just to make a record. See, I always want the artist that try to build a whole body of music on one album, so you can enjoy it. So you could say, 'I went with him here, I went with him here.'

The first record we made in three days. We literally stayed up for three days making the first album. It was crazy, crazy, crazy for us to do that. We couldn't believe anyone would give us a record deal. I look back on that record fondly but with just the slightest bit of a cringe.

Just about the entirety of the first album, 'Brown Sugar,' I wrote it, the majority of that record in my bedroom in Richmond. And all of the demos for it were done on a four-track in my bedroom. I think EMI was a little leery of me being in the studio producing it on my own, which is what I was fighting for.

I am sorry, but recording an album is just hard work; tedious, repetitive, and not very fun at all. Mixing is a bit better, but still pretty boring.

When I think about putting together an album, the process of listening to hundreds of songs each time and picking out the best 10 or so that will go on the record, it really sinks in as to just how many songs I've listened to all these years.

I grew up in the era of the concept album. What I do now is pick up on singles, and they are their own complete stories; you don't necessarily have to hear the rest of the album because I don't think albums are created like that anymore. They get songs from all over the place.

It's largely a misconception that Tame Impala is a band. We play as a band on stage, but it's really not how it is at all on the album. The album is just me.

The whole '400 Degreez' album was inspired by what Outkast was doing, Organized Noize. That was what I was listening to around that time.

When I first started writing the album, "Cry Baby" was a song that I really wanted to write because it represented all of these personal insecurities that I had for a long time.

I tend to have a lot of songs ready for each record I do anyway. I always have. I was thinking, the more you write, the better chance you're going to come up with a collection of stuff that is going to work together.

I recorded 80 per cent of the record in my guest bedroom; then, when 'Shine' went to number one on one of the charts, the label called and said, 'Can you do an EP?' Then, 'Can you do a full length? And can you do it in two weeks?'

The more I go on in this career of making albums, writing songs and playing music, the more I think of each album as a movie. I really wanted to make a film, but making a film is much more expensive than making a record.

Well you know, I've been into music my whole life, so to be able to put an album together with some of that music was awesome.