A Quote by Tommy Lee

The record is definitely a musical journey. It's kind of all over the place, which I like. — © Tommy Lee
The record is definitely a musical journey. It's kind of all over the place, which I like.
Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.
I just like so many different kinds of music that I like experimenting. I don't want to keep making the same record over and over and over. I'm an 'evolve or die' kind of a musician. I think it's cool to try new things.
I know that people don't listen to music much in the way when they'll put on a CD, sit down, have a drink or go on a car journey. People pick and choose and just listen to tracks. But when I make a record, I try to think about it as a 50 minute musical journey, so the mood is very important, as is the sequence of the songs.
Whenever I approach a record, I don't really have a science to it. I approach every record differently. First record was in a home studio. Second record was a live record. Third record was made while I was on tour. Fourth record was made over the course of, like, two years in David Kahn's basement.
People want to be the first with the record, they want to be the first to know which songs are on the record, all that kind of stuff. So I like to just stall them a bit. Personally, I love the idea of an album that's completely new, that no one's heard any free downloads, any pre-record releases, all that kind of stuff, and nothing's been played on the radio. Totally virgin, you know, a sealed record. That's my ideal, but it's very hard to get anybody else to agree to do that.
I most definitely wanted to make a record out of it. Due to the fact of the negativity and things that transitioned over the years, I just wanted to give [Chris Rivers] his space. I had this record "Danger" which Free Smith produced the beat. It was one of the first beats I got when I started recording again and one of the first I sang to.
I call it "being interrupted by success." We had done The Soft Bulletin, which came out in 1999, and we knew we that were gonna make another record before too long. But in between this, we were still in this mode of kind of just - not re-creating what we could be, but kind of doing different things. For the longest time in the Flaming Lips we were like, "Make a record, go on tour. Come back, make another record," and you know, I think, frankly, we were kind of like, "There's more to life than just recording records and going on tour."
My style has definitely evolved. When I first started out I think I was a little all over the place and the clothes kind of wore me rather than the other way round. But now I'm at the point where I'm comfortable dressing for me, I know what works and what I like.
I definitely felt the desire to, like - I definitely knew there was an elsewhere. I definitely knew that, like, if I were going to be free, I needed to be away from, kind of, like, Nashville and kind of get out of the South and get out of the country.
I like any story that starts one place and really takes a huge journey to a whole new place; that people in their life want to take that journey. They want to be able to find things in their life that aren't working and work through them to a new place of change.
A place like Sound City, which was just a big, beautiful room where you would hit record and capture the sound of the performer - a place like that isn't necessarily in demand anymore.
Someone gave me Roman Candle from Cavity Search when it came out. I was just starting to do A&R in the record business, and I remember being in my Volvo 240 in Silverlake, which is every bit the cliche it sounds like, sitting in front of my house playing the songs over and over again. It was the punkest record I had heard in so long.
It's the opposite journey from what I've usually done with films. I find it very easy to go from, say, a lit, pleasurable environment, like what you see outside there, to a very dark place. But the opposite journey, which is what this movie takes, is much more complicated.
I feel less and less like that every year, and I guess maybe even more so with every new record that I put out. I just think, as the years go by, it's harder and harder to really find a reason to be annoyed that you made something that people want to continuously talk about. Certainly there are contexts in which the record can be discussed which will get me on the defensive and make me want to put some kind of calibration or some kind of context on what the record means in relation to my career as a whole.
When I record music I like to be in one place and kind of have a base to keep going back to.
A musical audience is at best uninspiring, at worst definitely drab. ... Respectability hangs like a pall over the orchestra and the boxes; a sort of sterile sobriety ill-fitted to the passionate geometry of music.
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