It's easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.
I wanted to make an album that plays from the top to bottom and feels together and complete. That's just something that felt important.
I think 'Apricot Princess' actually came out before 'Flower Boy.'
It was always meant to ease out of a big radio song and flow into the next one. Don't is the bridge song in between Sing and Thinking Out Loud.
I wrote them kind of consecutively, starting with 'Holy,' and then '1950,' 'Talia,' 'Upper West Side,' 'Make My Bed,' and I was kind of like, 'This is it.' It felt right. It felt complete. It felt like a sentence. I really enjoyed making it.
I guess the idea of doing albums in their entirety, in sequence, appeals to people. I guess it's the memory of being able to hear the music in the way it was originally presented.
One of those things that I find hard to dispose of is my attitude to album sequencing, the layout of the pieces.
I would start off with a lively rag, then would come a ballad, followed by a comedy song and a novelty number, and finally, the hot song. In this way, I left the stage with the audience laughing their heads off.
I find that albums generally tell a story. Because it's music, it doesn't have to be in chronological order.
I think there's only eight songs on 'Born to Run' - I don't think it's much more than 35 minutes long. But as you move into it, where every song comes up in the sequence makes a lot of sense - though we weren't thinking about it; we were going on instinct at the time.
There are some great songs - like, I really like 'Snowcone' and 'Whelk Then' and 'No Problem.' I think I'm dissatisfied that it's not written from start to finish; it's over a year's worth of work that doesn't correlate.
Through the music I hope to give it an arc that gives it a greater sense of a journey through the set rather than a bunch of songs.
I've waited for the day my debut album is released my entire life, so naturally I've designed it to be listened to from start to finish - so every song flows into each other in a way that tells a sonic story.
One of the important things when you're making a record or doing a performance is the sequence of the songs. It really matters a lot because you want your project, your show, or your albums to sort of have a life.
And that format was - we'd been using that format, I guess, since the late '70s, and it was starting to get very predictable. In other words, certain songs would surface in the same points in the set every so often; it was like rotation.
I like records that flow really well and you don't have to skip around because there's lot of different jumps.
Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs.
In my opinion, an album has a story from start to finish and has a concrete concept.
I can't do a film where I appear in a song and then disappear.
There's really an art form to putting together a set list that flows evenly and that takes you on a ride and doesn't feel disjointed.
I don't like knowing what the next song is because that's what I'd think about during the number we're playing.
