I can't edit live as meticulously as I can for an album.
To get 300 songs to fit together on an album, it's not like I choose 300 songs and say these are the ones I wanted to pick. To get those 300 songs I sampled 1000's of songs and narrowed down the ones I felt worked the best musically.
All of my favourite albums have this incredible amount of conceptual glue to them, even if they are not telling a story.
The [2012 covers album] 2120 [South Michigan Ave.] was different. We covered a lot of classics there. But most of the time when we did it I always prided myself on digging up obscure songs that no one knew of.
In the rest of the world we had had two albums that were successful, so those two albums' hits and this new four-single package made up an album called Wham! The Final, which is basically greatest hits. We couldn't have done a greatest hits over here, because we'd only done one hit album.
We had to create an album where there wasn't one. I never listen to that album [ Music From the Edge of Heaven] because it wasn't an album.
I'm looking back to a period of my life when I was badly hurt and then looking at another time when I felt I had things going for me again, so I suppose there is a theme [of the Faith album].
By the next one [albom],Occupation: Foole, I was right back into the trip again. I'm more frantic, more breathless. You can hear how sick I am. If you want to see a cokehead, just look at the pictures on the Occupation: Foole album.
I've never listened to an album once I've finished it. All I hear is what I should've done different. I beat myself up over it.
Somebody that comes and dumps a brand-new album on me and doesn't play the old stuff, I'm pissed!
Just think how minimal somebody's family album is. But you start looking at one of them, and the word everybody will use is "charming." Something just happened. It's automatic, just operating a camera intelligently.
I come from a time when pop music was the coin of the cultural realm and in a certain way was the only coin of the realm; movies didn't matter as much, and not TV - it was all about pop music. In the era when I started - which was the early '60s - it was all about singles leading to albums.
I'm really careful with what the music gets put with, and we say no to so much stuff, loads of it, for things that might quadruple the sales of my album. But if it doesn't fit then it doesn't fit, you know?
The only album that I listen to upon recording a new one is my 'Cry' album, because sonically, I think it's my best album to date. But other than that, I've never listened to my records, ever.
Erykah Badu projects don't even sound like Erykah Badu projects. I don't even have one album that sounds like another one of my albums.
I would like to release an album that I truly believe in, thus it is hard to put a time limit on it. I want to really go deeper and discover myself again through music.
When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.
All the songs are pieces to the puzzle. They each represent something different. So it's really difficult to say one song represents the album.
As a drummer my job is to reproduce what made the people bop their heads when they first heard the album on the radio, or when they watched the music video.
We called the album 'Amarantine' to mean everlasting. Poets use the word to describe an everlasting flower and I loved the image of that.
Of all the albums I've made, I still don't feel like I've made the perfect album. I've had ones that touch on this, and others that touch on that, but never one that's just perfect and fully relevant. I don't know if I'll ever make it, but I'm certainly trying every day.
The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can't really explain - let's just say it's all I can really do while I'm doing it.
One thing that's really pulled me in to helping artists create their album is that I get to help them tell a story. It's about the way you frame that story and finding the best way to tell that story.
I wanted to make an album that melodically people can connect to; something that reflects our times and the kinds of difficulties we face.
I never really made a full album in Los Angeles before.
