Every now and then I have to teach directing. The thing about the theatre is that the most important thing you can do as a director is to make sure that everybody is in the same world - you have to create the world and make sure everyone buys into it.
I remember thinking that 'Earthworms' wasn't really an 'album' to me, only because it felt like a weird collection of songs more than an actual project.
Our palette is wide and eclectic. That's why we crank out a lot of different styles. To some people, it makes us seem disjointed or scattered. But when we play live, it makes sense to us.
Hence my obstinate emphasis on stylistic continuity from work to work rather than specific sibling relationships between the individual work and other members of its stylistic 'family' in the world outside.
It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.
I dont separate my work with the band from this solo project-Im sure the group could have recorded any of these, and they would have if the Fleetwood Mac project had come up at this time. I dont have any finished songs lying around.
'Beautiful Loser' had a lot of great records. It had a lot of really heartfelt songs on there. But I felt, at the time, it didn't have it's own cohesive sound.
When I started writing the music, I wanted everything to be consistent from the way I dressed to the way I presented myself online. I wanted everything to match what I was doing on stage.
Whenever I have a bunch of tunes written, I always find a kind of uniform that accompanies the songs.
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
I always work on the songs all together up until the very end. I never mix a song and think, "Okay, now that one's done." I think that's why it feels like songs are really connected, and I like that. They're all worked on kind of like a little family.
I feel as if I've been fairly successful with maintaining a cohesive tone between the work I make as a photographer and as a director.
My music sounds like one synergised thing, one message.
I like writing a body of music that has a cohesive, emotional thread through it.
A picture that is beautiful, or that comes off, or that works, looks as if it was all made at one stroke.
Television production is so insane. There's so many moving parts and flying pieces and you're desperate to make it cohesive and artistic and have something to say about the human condition that feels like it has value to its existence.
The script and the performances and the style all clicked.
There's no gap between the writer and the performer, which is what I think makes [Monty] Python unique. Five or six people who write Python and five or six who act it. That's what makes it unique.
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
I feel very English. I'm proud of it. I wanted there to be a thread connecting everything, the songs, clothes, artwork, even the string arrangements. It all creates a certain atmosphere.
I have songs that sound like this and songs that sound like that. I think it's just my vocal that keeps it all together.
I can't bear working with a click track, we're not click track people. But for "Mercy Is ..." we all got in one mind because the song is delicate; it's not a song that showcases a vocal or some virtuoso.
A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it's common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers.
Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.
Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.
