I know how to make a record that commercial radio or Triple J will smash now... It's kind of hard to stay true and write what you would write if you didn't have that in your head. Because I know I can get way more airplay and get this much bigger... and that's what I'm trying to avoid doing. Trying to avoid the poisons of success.
When the first record came out, I'd go down to radio stations pretty much every day to get the record played, and I would walk in and they'd tell us how much they loved the record, but they weren't sure how much they could play it because they were already playing a girl.
After struggling for so long in the industry and writing so many failed songs and hearing 'no' for so long - I'm so grateful every time I hear a song that I was a part of on the radio.
People got to know us from hearing us live because there wasn't much publicity or radio airplay for a long time.
If I had to play only for people who liked the music because they heard it on the radio, it wouldn't make me happy. That's why I'm working so hard to have, yes, a profile as an artist, but also a profile as a DJ.
We don't go around the world counting ticket and record sales, nor do we glue our ears to the radio to hear what's trendy at the moment - we're not that type of band.
If you want to put out a million CDs and sell them and get them played on the radio, and even videos, or whatever, if that still exists, that kind of muscle can only come from a label like Columbia.
It's like, on my solo stuff, every single person who buys the record, gets it. On the other stuff, the masses... when you have a hit on the radio, not everyone's going to get it. They are going to buy it for the hit.
I always felt like the Academy was very late in acknowledging things. I've seen them do it with hip hop when it should have been acknowledged. It was already penetrating mass levels of culture and radio, and yet they wouldn't give it a proper category.
Since the beginning of my recording career in 1975, I have had a little difficulty because the pop stations think I'm a jazzer who doesn't have a feeling for pop, so it's hard to get my records played. Similarly, black urban radio doesn't understand that with my R&B roots, I am more than a jazz singer. So I get pigeonholed.
It is difficult to get played at my age on the radio.
How were we to know 'Highway' would be such a success? It is one of my proudest achievements.
Our aim was to be playable on both AM and FM radio - something no one had done in a while.
There [are] times when I put out an album, and I don't hear my songs really on the radio a lot, and it's like, Dang, I ain't inside that world. But I'm still moving some people or touching some people.
When I came out of service, the first couple of releases didn't really hit so I just took a little hiatus and sat down to see what was happening. I just glued my ears to the radio and then I started writing - the first hit record that came out was 'Everybody Loves a Winner.'
We're just nerds that play music. Because we get played on the radio and have a Vitaminwater ad with Aaron Paul dancing on a treadmill, people are going to say we sold out. I don't write music for that. I write music for me.
I saw an Elvis Presley movie Jailhouse Rock, where he gets out of jail and makes his own records and takes them to the radio stations himself. And then, he puts records in the store. After seeing that, I made records an put them in stores.
I realized there are so many steps from getting a deal to having a hit.
I want my music to be really big. I have no interest in DIY Brooklyn; I don't want to be a small indie band.
On our studio album 'Fly From Here' in 2011, we spent a year and a half promoting that around the world.
There is no line of demarcation between the amateurs and the pros; everyone is using the same tactics and playing in the same arenas. The only thing that separates them is radio, but the artist doesn't control who goes to radio and who doesn't.
I enjoy music that is commercial. I think that in order for music to be heard in a lot of different situations, you have to always consider that. Commercial music, for the most part, is popular music, and you always have to keep that in mind. It's not so much financial as making sure it gets the shot and is heard on the radio.
Our first single, 'Ticket To Ride', was a kind of half-hit, half flop: in some places it was number one, in others it was ash-tray material.
'Smoke On The Water' was ignored by everybody to begin with. We only did it in the shows because it was a filler track from 'Machine Head.' But then, one radio station picked up on it, and Warner Bros. edited it down to about three and a half minutes. It then started getting played by lots of different radio stations.
The best compliment I ever had is, one day I was in Nashville, some disc jockey said, Hey, that sounds like a Tom T. Hall song. Up until then there hadn't been any such thing.
