One of the things that's influenced me musically was my experience at Brown University. I was surrounded by musicians that I really admired, and felt challenged to come up with music, lyrics, and recordings that stood up to the expectations of those musicians and myself.
I love listening to old records. Stuff from the '70s, even disco and funk records and a lot of early rock albums - what's great about those recordings is that you can actually hear the true tones of the drums themselves.
At the Isle of Wight, the sound went out and kind of kept on going. And I wasn't... when I came off stage I was kind of unhappy about how we had played. But now, I listen back to those recordings and it's not bad.
A big marker in my life was realizing you could record sound: I liked to make little recordings and then go back and listen to them. It becomes something outside of you then and you can listen to it objectively.
What does New York sound like? For me, the Charlie Parker at the Royal Roost recordings on the Savoy label are the total embodiment of the New York music experience.
I had to learn how to work in a studio at first because it's a totally different creative environment to the 'bedroom recordings' I'd done before, where I could translate my own ideas without having to explain them to anyone.
I find that I'm always struggling with the noise of the city. When I get a good take, there will be a horn or a siren or something. So it makes me very conscious of outside sounds, which in a way maybe led me to incorporate the field recordings.
I'm really a product of an excellent school system and supportive parents. My high school band director gave me recordings of Louis Armstrong, Kenny Ball, and contemporaries like Nicholas Payton.
That was American Recordings. I said, I like the name, maybe it'd be OK. So I said, I'd like to meet the guy [Rick Rubin ].I'd like for him to tell me what he can do with me that they're not doing now.
There are parts on 'Wind's Poem' that are literal recordings of wind. I had this old sound effects record that I got some wind from and then I figured out that distorted cymbals sound just like wind so I used that a lot.
I actually started the whole project some years ago with a live debut at Ancienne Belgique in Brussels. The focus was mainly on my favorite period of Billie Holiday, which was the late-50s Verve recordings, with essentially a small version of the Count Basie band.
You never knew what was going to happen in concert. It was a really exciting prospect to go onstage, and you can hear that in the live recordings ... wherever we were and whatever year it was, we always went onstage determined to do our best.
The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they're more entrenched than music.
When an old tape machine makes pitch wobble, some people would say that compromises fidelity and would try to get rid of it. But to me that wobble adds richness, it instantly brings back the feelings you associate with old recordings.
I love the sound of '70s glam records. I love that snare sound. The recordings I like, it's all based on if the snare sounds good. The drums have to sound great.
The rest of the world may devour Japanese hardware - from Honda Civics to Sony Walkmans - but Japanese software, such as books, movies and recordings, has had little impact outside Japan. The exception is video games.
I always appreciate when people save, and more importantly, share. As we speak, there are people in this world - mostly men - who have giant collections of recordings that no one will ever hear. And the value of that collection is almost defined by the fact that nobody else can hear it.
As I started to study old blues recordings and really pay attention to my favorites, it really started to come to me that all of my favorite pieces of music weren't produced, they were performed. The producer is nearly invisible: no thumbprint other than the composition and the performers.
'Cause I can make more money going in and doing my recordings and selling them through my entities that I have, rather than going to a record co. and them release a record and pay me 5 percent of what they make off it.
I grew up with four brothers, and in the back of my head I feel pretty masculine. It's always funny when I hear recordings of my voice, because it's so deep when I hear it in my head.
Sometimes in the past when I was going to perform a piece again I would listen to old recordings and try to reproduce the material. This time I realized that carrying around old information, trying to get everything in, and still be in the moment just doesn't work.
I love all holiday music. My two favorites would probably be Donny Hathaway's "This Christmas" and Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song." They epitomize Christmas for me. Those two recordings will never be touched. That's why I've never redone them.
My family is the engine of everything, and on a personal level, I feel peace, stability, and they give me force, which is reflected on my work, my recordings, and every time that I go out on tour. They are my base, my everything.
I grew up loving musicals. My mom had records of original cast recordings, and one of them was 'She Loves Me.' I wore that thing out singing along to Barbara Cook when I was eight years old.
People become so deeply attached to the sound of one period that they blow a fuse when you move on. I've heard people complain bitterly about recordings they haven't even heard.
I was once all by myself in a house on Fire Island. Where I compared the original cast recordings of two different versions of The Wild Party. A helicopter should have descended and taken me away to a gay penal colony. But of course, I was already there.
We always get back to old soul singers like Nina Simone, and how her recordings sound. Also new music like Tobacco, or people that use a mixture of analog and electronic music.
I gathered all the different Peel Sessions recordings together - I did six or seven of them over the years - and listened to all of them. These definitely have at least a superficial relationship to each other because they're all very spare.
When digital technology started becoming the norm, you've got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won't last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear.
Cause I can make more money going in and doing my recordings and selling them through my entities that I have, rather than going to a record co. and them release a record and pay me 5 percent of what they make off it.
The Vikings certainly didn't write anything about themselves; it was not a literate, but rather a pagan, culture. So what we get was written later by Christian monks. But there were occasional reportings and recordings of people who had traded usually with the Vikings.
[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.
[Referring to the diverse holdings of the library, including motion pictures, photographs, recordings, posters and other historic objects which collectively far outnumber the books]
My true memory has been tainted by old home videos of my sister and I, ages 3 and 5 respectively, singing karaoke to Britney Spears' 'Lucky' in our living room, and tape recordings of my parents trying to elicit songs out of our throats at a similar or younger age.
In the days following 9/11, when we were reeling and disoriented, there was a kind of solace to be found in old recordings, and even pseudo-folk singers like James Taylor seemed to be safeguarding something, drawing back bygone days.
Very few recordings exist in which Hitler can be heard speaking normally. But in those that do exist, it's evident he possessed quite a warm, calm voice. It's a completely different tone from what he used in his public appearances.
The best songs don't get recorded; the best recordings don't get released; and the best releases don't get played.
The thing is, it really did take us too long to get these recordings done. We've had our rough times in the studio in the past, but after four weeks most of the material would have been recorded. This time it seemed like it just goes on and on.
It was step by step that I earned my way into the lives and hearts of people by giving them recordings that I grew to love and as I found my listening audience also grew to love.
I didn't make my first solo record until 1981 so I don't have any 60?s or 70?s recordings but I am working on a large boxed set called DUST to be released next year, the 20th anniversary of my first solo record.
As there are more online archives of improvised music, it becomes more like the daily practice of playing it. It lessens the idea of there being masterpieces of improvised music through benchmark recordings.
I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.
'Hamlet' was the first movie I saw. In 1948, my mother said, 'I'm going to take you to see 'Hamlet' with Laurence Olivier.' She was worried about taking me to it because she wasn't sure I was old enough to understand it or to maybe be adversely affected by it, but I got recordings of it and memorized all the soliloquies.
I take photos, I used to make films, I journal incessantly, and I really value the documentation of life. Because it's almost like you are making something special by wanting to make it exist in an object - on paper or even just in the computer - making these recordings, making this music.
I know some bands that are precious about their new ideas. They're conscious of the fact that people can - even from mobile phones - begin to get clearer and better recordings of the songs... so they're a lot more hesitant to play them.
Throughout the '50s, tons of unknown locals came through Sun to record their demos. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis all made their first recordings at the former Memphis Recording Service.
I've been making the recordings for a long time, and I have tons and tons of them. I'm like a digital hoarder or something - everything is on like hard drives and whatever.
I don't believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that's dishonest. For example, I'm not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don't, what you hear is pretty much what I sing.
HeyHey is my favourite app. It's like Instagram but for sound recordings, with little soundbites from people's days. We spend far too much time looking down at our phones, so it's nice to have your head up while you listen to what other people have uploaded.
I didn't make my first solo record until 1981 so I don't have any 60's or 70's recordings but I am working on a large boxed set called DUST to be released next year, the 20th anniversary of my first solo record.
My interests are moving toward both 'sound and music,' not just 'music.' I have been doing lots of field recordings and also collecting lots of strange sounds.
Then little writings and recordings that thankfully continue to come up. I'm in this kind of wonderful, kind of awkward, off-putting, and strange position where there's nothing I want to do more than continue to make music, but the ways that I do things are not in tune with how I can do them commercially.
'Jigarthanda' will be the first in the Kannada industry to do this type of an experiment. All these days we use to do our recordings in Mumbai, Hyderabad, or in Chennai. But this time we have recorded in three different countries: Spain, Italy and the U.S. We have used around 50 foreign spring orchestra including violins, etc.
I don't plan [my recordings], I really don't. It's so spontaneous I wish all rock lovers and rock journalist could witness a Ted Nugent recording session. It is so primal, it's like idiot kids in the garage with their first loud amplifiers, its intoxicating, it is irreverent, it is uninhibited.
I don't know if everybody does, but I have a really hard time listening to myself on recordings, unless we've spent weeks and weeks and weeks listening and mixing.
Country Music has always changed for the times, if you listen to the recordings from the 50's to 60's to 70's, to now, the message is still there, basic down to earth songs about real people, it the music that's been updated. Some of it I like, but still prefer the traditional sound.
My favorite recordings are the ones that feel like there were no middlemen in the creation. That's the biggest problem with most films and records being made today - too many people involved. I think it dilutes the artist's intent and inspiration.
Kishore Kumar is the voice of India, M.D. Rafi taught me to sing romantic numbers, while Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's live recordings helped me prep for stage shows.
Right now, I'm thinking in terms of just having a good band, man. Having a good act for the stage. Being a good performer, you know? Connected to that is future recordings, and future tunes, that kind of stuff.
Deepfakes - seemingly authentic video or audio recordings that can spread like wildfire online - are likely to send American politics into a tailspin, and Washington isn't paying nearly enough attention to the very real danger that's right around the corner.
I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.
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