I think recording at home feels more organic, and injects some more personality into the music.
I live for playing live. All my records are live, since After the Gold Rush, with the exception of Trans and the vocals on Landing on Water.
You can do a lot to shape the feeling of a song by the way you record it.
I don't make records that way, where I'm trying to please the marketplace or anything. Not because I have anything against that, it's just never been a part of my aesthetic, even when I was with the Pixies.
I know when I started I would have been happy to sound like the Beatles or Joe Tex or whoever. You want to sound like most bands, you want to sound like their records and that's how you learn your chops.
I do think music sounds better when it's on tape and more simply recorded.
For the most part, I like to record music as I write it.
There are no calculations in the records I make. I record as many songs as I can. Songs that I think are my best.
Gaslight has a specific way of playing and recording that's sort of become the way now.
I enjoy recording live better, but I think by the nature of it you are going to end up with something that's a little bit more traditional.
I just fell into the Dylanesque idea of recording. He is real fast.
Eric's Trip is still a huge influence on me. The style of those recordings and the rawness of them is very inspiring. And the density of the distorted parts, amazing.
I think some people record songs and make records a certain way to cater to radio. If you're born to make commercial music that's cool. But if you're born to not make commercial records, maybe you're meant to cater to another market.
I like that kind of classic-type sound. A lot of my favorite albums were tracked live, with a four-piece band. I love the way those albums sound, but I want to make records that sound like that in the way I like to make stuff.
I'm recording freely, and if I make a song, I release it immediately, so I'm more likely to believe in one song at a time as opposed to albums.
Original Monkees' songs were produced very thinly, on purpose.
I love making each record sound different.
Beyond the Thunder is the closest I've recorded to an acoustic thing.
I felt it was time for there to be a document of what we sound like now.
I like to think of my style as pretty versatile. And I'd like whatever I record to reflect that to be mostly genre - to be just something that people want to listen on to see what I'm going to come up with next. That's the kind of music I'm into.
If I'm feeling like rock, we'll do some of that, and if I'm feeling some other way, we might do some of that. So, that's typically how I record and write and play music and anything else.
I like the continuity of singing my lines together instead of going line by line.
I'm not a fan of taking too long in the studio. I always do one vocal take and jump out of the control room, and people push me back in... It's a real turn-off to hear things that are too polished. I feel like I've almost fought for the right to be that kind of musician - we used to be on a major label, and now we're on an indie.
Most records are usually not united by one specific story, but that seems to be something that I like and that I find easy to do.
