As a little girl, I remember thinking how great it was going to be, to be a musician when I grew up, how I was going make a jazz album, then a country album, then a rock album.
I realized at a young age that sequence in an album is almost as important as the songs that are on the album.
Gamma was a logical progression after doing the Open Fire record.
'Habits & Contradictions' is the prequel to 'Setbacks.' I had all these titles already in my head before I even dropped 'em. Like 'Setbacks,' I knew that was gone be the first one; I knew 'Habits & Contradictions.' I knew 'Oxymoron.' I got two more albums that I already have the title to it, and I know how I'ma play the theme off of it.
The reason 'Fireball' is my favorite album of that period is that without 'Fireball,' we would never have been able to make 'Machine Head.'
Most people, from their second album on, find it much harder to be as spontaneously creative as they were with their first couple of records, and some people only have one thing that they do.
I feel like our whole discography up through 'Hail to the King' was young, fun, and exciting. It was aggressively driven. 'The Stage' was the first step in the band becoming a more mature musical entity.
Many of the songs on Undertow were written at the time Opiate came out.
You know, it's absolutely connected to The Mollusk in that, it's what we're writing after The Mollusk. A lot of this stuff reminds me of things on The Mollusk.
I never do any album to beat it. I do it to extend it.
I skipped 'College Dropout' and 'Late Registration' and went straight to '808s & Heartbreak.'
I started running to different albums, and I was starting with the short albums and moving on to the longer albums. I was interested in how they built up, in tempo and intensity. it made me interested in albums again, too.
You can never go back to the first two albums in a career.
I can understand why we got bad reviews. We went right over people's heads. One album would follow another and would have nothing to do with what we'd done before. People didn't know what was going on.
It seems like people need to get into the last album until they can tolerate the next one. And then, slowly but surely, by the time the new one's available, they've gotten into the last one and they really love it.
I had deeper, more reflective songs on the first album.
Playing albums in sequence can be awesome, or it can be very limiting.
All of our other albums were consecutive year after year: 'No More Mr. Nice Guy,' 'Step in the Arena,' 'Daily Operation,' 'Hard to Earn.' After 'Hard to Earn,' a four-year gap is a lot of not having Gang Starr music, as far as an album is concerned.
Album 1 is proving that you're worth listening to, album 2 is proving that it wasn't a fluke, and album 3 is the most authentic thing I've ever done.
The second album is the hardest to write. It's nothing like the first album.
We knew we wanted to put a lot of melody into it - a lot more than what we did on our first album.
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.
I just put out a hardcore double album. Next I'm gonna put out an introspective album.
I had between 20 and 40 songs for 'Detox,' and I just couldn't feel it. Usually, I can hear the sequence of an album as I'm going, but I wasn't able to do that. I wasn't feeling it in my gut.
My favorite Extreme records were the last two. I can't listen to the first one.
