Quotes About Evolution

You continue to evolve with each album that goes by and, as an artist, you continue to expand with every recording project.

I sequence during the entire recording process. The sequencing changes as I'm recording and as I'm listening. From when I'm, like, four songs in, I start trying to figure out which song should come after which. Which is important, and it changes as the album goes.

Gaslight has a specific way of playing and recording that's sort of become the way now.

There are a lot of great recording artists, like Jack White and Jack Johnson, who stay confined inside a very small box, but I'm more like Bon Iver, who recorded an album with programmed drums, and the next record was totally organic. I get that.

People keep inventing all these new machines, and producers and recording engineers keep wanting to use them.

I became a recording artist before I knew it. And I just - when I would listen to my old records, I'd just hear this young, extremely nervous fella that that made me want to run out of the room, you know, rather than listen to what he had to say.

I have been recording every single one of my shows since 1994. Every single joke I've ever done is on a hard drive. I can tell you when I wrote every joke I wrote. I can tell you the first time I said it, when I made it different, when I made it better.

For the first 12 years of recording I would finish the album, then on the day it came out I'd never hear the songs again.

It's a funny thing having a recording be part of your career. It means you can go back and revisit yourself, in a way most people don't.

Everything has changed since I started recording in 1972. But the very things that have opened this industry, like the digital platforms to reach more people, have also killed things that were happening before in the recording studio. Now, most of the time, there are no real musicians in the studio; it's people with sequencers and things.

But I listen to live recordings of things that I did back in the '70s and then how I've done things since. And there's no doubt about it: if I compare the two, it's like chalk and cheese.

I'm very aware of what, say, electric guitar recordings in the '60s sounded like.

I listen to my old records and I think, 'How did I ever get on the radio?'

Once I'd heard 'Modern Times' by Bob Dylan, it really changed the way I wanted to make records.

Formats are constantly changing, and there are really no rules for the way you put your records out anymore.

When I think of the artists I admire and seek out musically. It's because I'm curious about where they're going to go the next time they have a chance to put a record out. It's not about where I find them on the radio dial, or how many records they're selling.

My favorite Extreme records were the last two. I can't listen to the first one.

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.

I keep my ears open. The world can change overnight; that's what happens in this world. You never know. You have to keep your eyes and ears open. If you can't keep up, you ain't gonna catch up. I've been making records since 1953, and you just have to keep up.

Though, since the first record, I've dramatically changed my expectations for our records.

I knew that as a DJ from 1970 on up that I would eventually come with this sound. I brought out all these other break beats that you hear so much on a lot of these records.

With our first two records we backed ourselves into a hole musically.

I always say to people that I left hip-hop in '97, meaning that I departed from listening to predominately hip-hop and just started really getting into records from the late '60s, early '70s. And once I made that change, I realized how much great music was made back in the day, and it started to become apparent how much we've lost in music.

You get a realisation at some point in your career that whatever it is you do, you can no longer continue to do it. You just realise you can't put out the same records forever.