A Quote by Michael McDonald
Most of my life is taken up with family. It takes me awhile to get a record together that I feel is worthy of putting out.
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i love playing and chatting with children...feeding and putting them to bed with a little story, and being away from the family has troubled me throughout my...life. i like relaxing at the house, reading quietly, taking in the sweet smell that comes from the pots, sitting around a table with the family and taking out my wife and children. when you can no longer enjoy these simple pleasures something valuable is taken away from your life and you feel it in your daily work.
Stop trying to figure it out. I love puzzles, but when I'm done putting together a puzzle, I feel accomplished, and then I wonder, "What's next?" Then I go start another puzzle. Life is a puzzle that I feel like we'll never fully put together. And I like that because, ultimately, I don't want to have life figured out and then wonder, "What's next?" That seems scary to me.
The 'where' doesn't really matter for me. It's whenever I get time to spend with the people that I treasure the most in my life, that's when I am at my happiest. I don't get to see them as much anymore, so the times that we actually get to meet up and just hang out together mean a lot to me.
When I came back to it, we amicably separated from Warner Bros. I just picked up where I left off, trying to write the rest of this record. It took awhile to get out.
I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.
It's actually been pretty liberating for me to fully get behind a cause that I feel is worthy and to stand on it and to follow where my heart takes me.
Putting together a hit record is like putting together a puzzle.
I have learned that while your putting your record together you can get so caught up in making what you want that you forget what you wanted in the first place.
The public doesn't get to see everything. I worked with X a couple times since then. Me and X have a close relationship. We actually did a record they were going to put on the Training Day soundtrack but he ending up buying the record from me and putting it on Great Depression as a bonus track.
The way the press works, people don't like to review or talk about EPs. It's considered, 'Why don't you just wait for the record?' But for someone who's creating, and the audience, they can get material quicker. I almost feel like putting out a few songs every couple months might be better than putting out an album every year or two.
The most agreeable thing in life is worthy accomplishment. It is not possible that the idle tramp is as contented as the farmers along the road who own their own farms, and whose credit is good at the bank in town. When the tramps get together at night, they abuse the farmers, but do not get as much satisfaction out of it as do the farmers who abuse the tramps. The sounder your argument, the more satisfaction you get out of it.
If I could have a record that represents every stage of my life, I'd be putting out one a month. Everything is always changing, and so is the way that I feel about stuff.
When you have kids and you're married...you know, life takes its toll on you after a while, and then you're just not as creative, you're not as motivated... And it takes a special person when it's time to dig down and do a record, to really go in there and pour out whatever it is you got in you to put on a record, and that's what we did.
I want my records to be the most magnificent and glorious-sounding records, but also want them to be the most intense and fragile. And I want that all in the same ten-second bit of music. And it just takes a while to get there, and I don't write the songs and then go and record them, I write in the studio. So it takes a while to kind of piece them together and know that that's what I want it to be like. And I constantly throw the bits up in the air and see how they land, and eventually they kind of keep landing in the same place and that's where it stays.
I was too shy, I think, to sing publicly. It takes a particular kind of person. And when I was young, I was not that person. In the first instance, when a record company said to me, do you want to try and make your record, my first reaction was, no, I'm not worthy - I couldn't possibly, and so on and so forth.
What people generally tell you is, "We'll all agree," and then once you sign, they expect to get their own way. I think it was a bit of a surprise that I was still very headstrong even after signing. I wasn't so happy to get a deal that I would agree to anything. In fact, I disagreed on most things and got my way on most things, which I think was to all of our benefit. But they wanted the record to come out, and I wanted the record to come out, so we had to work together.
