A Quote by Robert Wyatt
This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome.
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The old ways still apply. You can still send tapes to record companies, and there are record companies, you know, there are one or two of the record companies do declare proudly that they listen to every single one that comes.
When people ask me if I have a hobby, a lot of times my answer is that I like to surf in warm water. I like to ski, if I have the opportunity. But really, I like to go to my studio and write music that I want to write, where there's no pressure to come up with a hit single.
I don't put a lot of pressure on myself when I'm writing. It feels like if I come up with something good, or I come up with something bad, I'm not too worried.
When I put out a record or single I don't allow myself to set up expectations like, 'This song must be a number one hit. Its got to sell X amount of records.'
We've always used that as a goal - the record that literally every single track on it could be a hit. A record that breaks doors down, that opens up new opportunities to us, that helps you achieve true immortality as an artist.
I threw up before every single football game I played, and I did so up through my NFL career. It was good pressure. It was pressure to be good. It was pressure to be the best. It was pressure to want to win.
I think that there's the self-imposed pressure to come up with something that's good. For guys like us, that's much more important than any external pressure could really be.
Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.
As I've gotten older, now I've really got to back that up with record sales. Anytime showed me that I could still have some of those elements I wanted, but you still have to come with hit after hit after hit.
There are good people in radio and the record companies, but there are others who are completely in the wrong job and holding music up in the process.
Things like, when a total stranger says, 'I want you to record something for my forthcoming wedding,' that can be a bit tiresome. But it's a high-class problem. It doesn't hurt my feelings.
There is pressure when you have a very big book like 'Shadow Divers' to follow up with something big. But you can't let that pressure determine what you do. You just look for the best stories, and when you find a great one, you tell it.
When you are involved with the film and the character, you don't find it tiresome at all. But if you think it's tiresome, it will be.
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 think the good thing about the Internet is to give something away and to sell something else. Get a business model like that because the old brick and mortar record stores are falling apart, and the big record companies are collapsing under their own weight.
It seemed like whatever I touched, I was breaking record after record. I just knew I was on. I completely destroyed all existing shooting records there - an omen of things to come.
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