Every time I felt low, I just put on an Elvis record and I'd feel great, beautiful.
[I]n America, at least, we have a pretty good record for behaving in a fiscally responsible fashion, with one exception - namely, the fiscal irresponsibility that prevails when, and only when, hard-line conservatives are in power.
President Bush, yes, spent money like a drunken sailor, and left the nation with a record $400-billion deficit. President Obama, however, is spending far more money than Bush, with a record $1.8 trillion deficit projected for his first year.
I don't wanna be equal with anybody. I wanna be above equal. I don't think most people are equal to me. I'd like to communicate with everybody; I'd like to do something universal, I'd like to have the hit record of the world. But that's not the same as being equal.
I had a handful of records, but when I was 11 years old, I liked Puccini as much as Little Richard. They both made sense to me.
How many records you sell really does not matter. It's whatever you give.
I finally realized that so much of the music world is about how much money you've got, how much you can pay to make your record successful.
Everyone wants to pretend like they sprang out of the ground with an Animal Collective record in their hands and a David Bowie haircut, and that's just not the case. You discover these things gradually.
I used to work in a record store. I'm kind of a record nerd.
You have total freedom. It's like, if you do a solo record, there are no restrictions and you can do whatever you want, good or bad. You can have these passing fancies where you go in to the studio one day and you want to do something like what you did on the way in. That's dangerous. You have to have some sort of focus.
A lot of people see a Nissan ad and they see a finished product in a record store or on iTunes and that's the face of the band.
And once the music is out there, when you're selling a record and selling music and people are going to do whatever they want with it, it's kind of hard to resist certain opportunities, especially in the record market now.
In theory, when you're working with a record label, you're just borrowing their money. And that's basically how the record industry works, right? It's like, you borrow $100,000 from a record label, so you don't make any money until you make back that money for them. In theory, they have you held hostage, so you've got to do every little stupid thing that they want you to do.
I have a relatively good track record.
I wasn't interested in fabricating things and altering what I did to make hit records.
Everything changes all the time, and unfortunately, everyone who knows what you do by buying records only hears a small amount of what's going on in your life.
The idea of the record is that it's a statement for working with a group, of a collaborative work. That should be visible in the music.
I don't listen to music throughout the day very often. I don't own a record player. I don't really have a stereo system. Most of the music I listen to these days is on the web or on MySpace pages, stuff like that.
Anybody who says they don't want to be seen on a show which has millions of people watching it at one time when they're in the business of selling records is a bit silly.
When you're on the pop treadmill, you don't always feel that cool because you have to do things to promote the record that aren't necessarily your environment.
I think initially, the record industry struggled a lot with digital media because there are a lot of aspects to it that can potentially destroy our industry.
I don't know what they're thinking about. Just because someone says, 'I like what you do' or something: They might like it today and tomorrow they might not. I've had that experience with record companies.
It's very hard to get good songs because a lot of writers record their own; they keep the best for themselves.
[Fidel Castro] has a very good [human rights] record.
The record companies are interested in the kind of sales they can get from the rock groups.
