I'm the one driving the strategy and I'm an artist. What I've convinced the company to do is to just be totally open about exactly how everything works.
I think we're at a moment in history where all the rules are out the window; it's not about "Here's a single, and then let it build for a couple of months and then put out an album." Doing a common project Supa Dups we're having fun thinking about how we can improvise and make it fun for people to be fans of the music.
You don't have to forego education to do anything. Even if you want to go to the NBA, you should read.
If you want to be taken seriously, you almost have to act really serious.
I've always felt that singing is half technical, half taxing. You've got words, a melody, and an instrument, and you have to do justice to the words. You're just a medium for people to feel the song.
If you don't have an idea, you can defer to someone else. It's like having a baby with someone - it's not a clone of you, but it's partly you.
One of the big challenges I've thought about in making record is that the role of computers has become so inescapable and computers offer so many possibilities for creativity, but they also make you lazy.
I'm not the guy whose gonna shoot 10,000 free-throws until I'm Michael Jordan - and it did happen kind of accidentally that I said, "Okay, yeah, I'll try singing."
The reason I invest in technology is it's the only work humans do that actually is creative. All other types of economic activity are just moving money from one pool to another, whereas technology is what allows us to create value out of thin air.
I'm not a super prolific creator, I don't make stuff everyday, and I don't have a soundtrack constantly playing in my head. I think I had years and years of pent-up aesthetic ideas that I wanted to express.
The reason companies work is because you're able to get a lot of people doing the work; it's not because of this visionary. Steve Jobs didn't make Apple; it was a bunch of people. The building of the right team is an art in and of its own right.
In a certain respect, in a movie, you inevitably have a lot of people doing a lot of different jobs because that's the only practical way to get it done. When you make a record, you can still be an auteur, because you can make a whole record without anyone's help if you want.
The more I make stuff, the more I become aware of when I feel like I'm making bullshit or feel like I'm making something I can stand behind.
It's so much easier to use the default sounds in the synthesizers in Logic than it is to make your own thing or to learn how to play an instrument.
To leverage those things that are common to everybody, and to present them in a way that's sort of naked, is more courageous in art than constantly trying to be evasively too cool.
You can't use irony as a way of disengaging with the difficult or emotional aspects of life.
I want the ethic of being independent and open-minded, having a lot of integrity, intellectually, to be part of anything I do.
I want to have freedom of thought and expression - not get beaten down into some corporate existence, where there's so much risk of embracing the truth that you feel like you can't do it.
