The whole experience of getting an album from an artist you like and listening to it from beginning to end is sort of gone. Now it's piecemeal.
I think good music makes you feel free, and if people feel free when they come to a show or listen to my music, that would mean the world to me.
I get tons of messages every day telling me, 'Your music has provided me with answers.'
I don't make records so I can sit down afterward and listen to them. I make them so other people can sit down and listen to them.
Songwriters write songs, but they really belong to the listener.
How we absorb music is unique. I know what I do. When I'm listening to music, I tend to find myself in a song. That's what really makes you connect is if you feel what that song is saying.
I've heard some tunes in recent years that were pretty close to that same idea. The idea was you turn on the radio and you want to hear some music and up comes a commercial.
Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn't work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading "acts" too much; it becomes irritating to you listening to it.
You look at a song like 'Lightning Crashes,' and it's just so universal.
I really try to be aware of the purpose of each song. There are songs on my record that I want people to have sex to, and songs people can listen to when they're pissed off.
An album, for me, is not just a commercial product. It's about presenting a world to people, for them to explore and enjoy. How they do that is up to them.
My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.
I want people to feel confident when listening to my music.
I do like the idea of pulling in different producers to get new perspectives. That's what I did with Vows and I feel it just gives variety and makes for a more exciting journey for the listener.
As a musician, you never understand why people connect with certain songs.
As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.
I don't release records to be anything but enjoyable.
I skipped 'College Dropout' and 'Late Registration' and went straight to '808s & Heartbreak.'
I try to spend a lot of time thinking of what it is I want to say, and how I want to say it. Mainly because I know what it's like as a fan to hear music that is just exactly what I needed.
I'm making music for other people to listen to for pleasure. And hopefully, later on maybe they'll listen to it and go, "That bass line, boy, did you hear the way those drums interacted with that?"
That's what made me fall in love with music in the first place was the idea of being able to take listeners on a journey across forty or sixty minutes.
It'll never get old to hear a song that I wrote on the radio or to hear what someone experienced when they heard a song I wrote.
I'll let the record [Who You Selling For] speak for itself. I don't want to get too in-depth with my personal opinions of it and where the songs came from because I think it messes with the listener to know the inside mindset of the writer. For example, I watched a Pink Floyd documentary the other day, and I learned that "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" was about [frontman] Syd Barrett. I didn't want to know that!
Especially in repetitive music, to make a long piece of music you have to be extremely skilled in your sleight of hand. Just to make long form music it's very difficult and you really have to consider what you're putting someone through.
In chamber music, the audience can hear each instrument and understand (and feel) what the composer and the musicians have in mind as they play.
