For me, I work very self-contained. It's literally just me sitting in a room doing it until the very end of the process when other musicians come in and instruments are recorded.
One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians.
Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.
Tis the common disease of all your musicians that they know no mean, to be entreated, either to begin or end.
I do the work with friends who are musicians as well. I'm working on a piece of music and I have an idea of who I want on the vocals, but I don't really have a list.
I've heard from writers and musicians and fans that they think I'm underrated.
As convenient as that would be to make it easier to communicate with more prolific musicians, I don't want to think of music like a math equation.
If an ensemble - I don't care if it's a duet or a forty-piece orchestra - the musicians, the two of them or the forty of them, are all trying to play as tight as possible, as one person. They're trying to play like they are one person.
You know what rock musicians are? They are hung up, neurotic, over-weight hippies with sex problems.
To actually get together and make a band record feels like a bit of a big deal, and that can be quite daunting when you're musicians.
I have learned a lot from jazz. I compare good acting to jazz music. The more you study and prepare as an actor, the more equipped you are to live in the moment. Just like the gifted musicians in my dad's quartet, it takes a courageous actor to be free.
There's no reason to stop. Who knows what's around the bend? To participate, meet new people. It's mostly other musicians and people like you, or anybody I meet who's in this, that keeps me going.
Being from a classical environment, I've always been provoked by classical musicians thinking that classical music is so much greater art than pop. I've always been annoyed by that.
My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; weve become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.
Musicians are not so concerned with language.
It's funny, there aren't too many musicians that also moonlight as studio engineers. There's a few - the really brilliant ones.
There are a lot of musicians who are still desperately trying to pretend that it's 1998 and by having a huge marketing campaign, they somehow believe that they can sell 10 million records. That's delusional. No one sells 10 million records. The days of musicians getting rich off of selling records are done.
If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.
I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the blues.
Music chooses her musicians.