People who care about records are always giving me a hard time. I mean, I would destroy records in performances, and break them, and whatever I could do to them to create a sound that was something else than just the sound that was in the groove.
I like to sort through music and see whatever pops out to me or inspires me. If I could have a production team going and kind of mix records with me, that would be cool; to take the records and have them sound the way I want them to sound. But I'd rather sort though music to find them things.
I care about the records I make and I love writing songs and some songs are really dear to me and they mean something. But the memory of making the records and the activities surrounding the records, the people involved in them is actually a bigger thing to me.
I am not that thrilled about the way our records sound anyway. Don't get me wrong, I work hard on them and I want them to sound fantastic but I'm happy to have another interpretation of them anyway.
The game is always going to be bigger than the man and it doesn't matter what you are doing; records or whatever, somebody is just going to come along and break your records. But to achieve something that people would always look up to is something you will always appreciate.
I never want to go back and remix old records, either. If a record sounds shitty, that's just the sound it has. I just take it as part of the music. Some of my favorite bands - their old records sound terrible. But that's just part of the sound. If they were perfect, I'd probably hate them. Same thing with movies.
I don't really care so much what people say about me because it usually is a reflection of who they are. For example, if people wish I would sound like I used to sound, then it says more about them than it does me.
I wish records got made faster and looser with less thought in them, but since touring is so much more profitable than records, you spend so much time on the road that it's hard to work on them. And the records get further and further apart.
With my records, it's just a matter of trying to create something fresh for myself in a very finite context, which is the pop song. I don't know anything about the people who buy my records, and what, if anything, they get out of them.
That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.
I see myself as real. Like I mean if I was the President I would have a responsibility, because people put me there. Nobody put me here. They just buy my records. They wouldn't buy my records if my records wasn't good. I'm being who i am in the record.
My dad would play me all of these records: Miles Davis records, John Coltrane records, Bill Evans records, a lot of jazz records. My first exposure to music was listening to jazz records.
You can't have 12 records on your album and none of them sound alike. You gotta kind of have something to make them say, 'That sounds like Rakim.'
On first listen, it's nice to just soak up the sound without thinking about what it means. It's like a relationship. Records I've had for years mean more to me now than they did years ago.
You can make records from now 'til doomsday, and there are something like 50,000 records released every year, but the public gets to hear very few of these. They just won't know. They might be great records, but how in the world is the public supposed to find out about them?
We needed to make a sound that's not gonna fit in with everything else - we wanted to make something that was completely unique and individual to us. We spent a lot of time trying to make a sound that was a One Direction sound. At first it was quite hard to do that, but I'm really happy with the sound.
If you listen to really deep ambient records that don't move too much, very still records, long after those records are finished, you might find yourself listening for hours to the sound of the room.