Album Quotes - page 36
My mother passed away in 2004, and then my dad 10 years later. That period in between, I wrote songs like "Death Came”, and then after my father passed away I wrote, "If There's A Heaven” and "If My Love Could Kill”, which I wrote about the Alzheimer's disease that killed my father. There's a lot of dealing with loss, and heavy stuff, and life. It's a lot different of an album than some of my earlier ones, like Essence, when I was still struggling with unrequited love as a younger girl.
Lucinda Williams
That was a very moving and poignant experience. We didn't say much about it beforehand, and we didn't say much about it afterward, because we thought the music said enough. I wanted to do ‘Boot Camp', because that was my favorite song on [Soundgarden's 1996 album] ‘Down On The Upside', so I went and learned it, but the thing with Chris is, he would tune the guitar to his voice, so it's kinda complicated to learn from following YouTube!
Chris Cornell
It's that weird magic of if you sing a song you're connecting to emotionally, it's going to trick me into feeling my emotions. I'm not feeling your [pain], I don't know what happened to you, but you have just tricked me into feeling my own pain and my own emotions and that is an amazing thing. That's this miraculous thing about music. Film can do it too, art can do it, but music does it great. That's where making an album like this ['Higher Truth'] is exciting and special. The downside is you pretty much have to do it on every song. You don't get a free pass unless you write a joke song, which I'm not good at. If I wrote like the [Beatles'] ballad ‘Rocky Raccoon' or something I could get away from it for a second. A song about a raccoon that gets in a gun fight.
Chris Cornell
There is no set sort of rules, or no set sort of formula to the way we work in the studio ... so it's difficult to know ... what we'll move on to next. We don't like to say, "Never, no we'd never do this" ... But, we ... like the setup as far as there's only three people in the studio ... because the work is very personal, very intimate, very emotional ... and that is very important to the album.
Enya
A Sky of Honey is, in a sense, a lyric poem set to music. Full of lush, fecund melodies which swing from jazz to rock, it is threaded through with bird song and chatter and feels distinctly organic and earthy.... Side two is the album Pink Floyd might have made if Kate Bush had been their lead singer and lyricist in 1979.
Kate Bush
Illusion, dance, mime, even magic - the Tour of Life, as it was called, had the lot.
I shan't forget the way those Pink Floyd-like whale sounds that open The Kick Inside album heralded Kate's entry to the stage as waves were projected on huge screens and her band launched into Moving.
For a split second, the audience thought Kate was lip-synching because there was no microphone, but in pre-dating Madonna by a couple of decades, she was wearing a headset to allow free movement around the stage.
Every song from that first album was performed before the switch to stuff from follow-up Lionheart, virtually every number warranting a change of costume and stage set. ... The entire show was pure theatre.
Kate Bush
Her talent was precocious. "The Saxophone Song" and "The Man With the Child in His Eyes" were recorded as demo tapes when Kate was still at school. The first album, The Kick Inside (1978), caused tremendous media interest and is still the public's favourite. Her voice, criticized at the time, was small and childlike, the range erratic, if impressive. Since then it has improved enormously, deepening and gaining power and flexibility, until now it is a great asset, individual and capable of both subtle and stunning effects.
Kate Bush
When the conductor Richard Hickox rang me one day in 1984 to ask if I could help with a rather unusual job for which he and his choir had been engaged, I was intrigued. Kate Bush, it transpired, was working on her new album, Hounds of Love, and for one track, Hello Earth, she wanted a chorus to recreate the orthodox singing/chanting that made such a contribution to the film Nosferatu.
Kate Bush
It's clear Bush is still a force to be reckoned with. The problem, though, with female genius - for many men at least - is that very frequently it is not like male genius. And with its songs about children, washing machines going 'slooshy sloshy', Joan of Arc, Bush's mother, not to mention the almost pagan sensuality that runs through here like a pulse, Aerial is, arguably, the most female album in the world, ever. ... the artistry here is so dizzying, the ambition and scope so vast, that even the deafest, most inveterate misogynist could not fail to acknowledge it. Genius. End of.
Kate Bush
She has always freely admitted being like a little girl in many ways, and furthermore, happily presumes she'll still be that way in her dotage. It's certainly still a factor on Aerial, both in the track "Bertie" itself and in the memories and reminiscences that cobweb some other songs. But compared to the darker corners of the mind sometimes mined in earlier songs, the new album seems a much sunnier affair: an enduring image I took away from it - not necessarily a lyric, though it might have been - was of windows flung wide open, their curtains billowing out in the breeze, a room's long-dormant dust stirred into life again.
Kate Bush
Come the recording day, a group of male choristers, more accustomed to singing church services than backing vocals, descended on Bush's home, which was equipped with its own studio. Doubtless they were imagining that they were about to meet a wild-eyed rock babe, but Kate, quiet and unassuming - the kind of sympathetic, slightly shy girl who greets you from behind the counter at the local chemist - introduced us to her friend the bass player Del Palmer, who engineered the session. None of the singers or Richard had ever gone over and over four or five phrases so exactingly. No measure of Bach or Mozart had, in their experience, been subjected to such surgical scrutiny, and I began to worry that their voices might begin to tire. But Bush knew and got what she wanted and "Hello Earth" is, I think, a remarkable track on the album that finally broke the American market and established her as an iconic and hugely influential figure. I can't wait to hear what she has been up to now.
Kate Bush
Bill and I were pretty much the same age bracket, and strangely enough, we both went through the same influences, starting with Nat Cole, going into Bud Powell during the bebop period, and then getting into the Lennie Tristano school orienta-in my particular case, Lee Konitz more than Lennie. I mean, in an era when everybody else was playing funky piano, we... I suppose, in a general category, that made us both the same. Whereby [sic] to my mind, we were both radically different. But after I put out that first album, the reviews started off by saying, "Clare Fischer owes much to Bill Evans." And then, when I would write an album, they would say "Clare Fischer owes much to Gil Evans." And I would call that my Evans brothers syndrome.
Clare Fischer
I think the trick for any songwriter is authenticity. For the young songwriter coming up who is connected to his generation, as I was connected to mine, write honestly about what's going on in the center of your life. You know, when "We've Only Just Begun" was a Number 1 record, I think the Number 1 album in the country was "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." So it was as far away from what was happening in the music scene as you can get. And yet it was a hit. I think it was a hit because of, obviously, Karen's amazing vocal, but I think that any time we write authentically and honestly about what's going on in the center of our chest, because people are so much alike, there's a big a chance that it's going on in the center of your chest, too.
Paul Williams (songwriter)
It's influenced a lot by Led Zeppelin and anything from that era really. Before the album, when I actually wrote it and showed Ben and Chris, Ben and Chris liked it and they wanted to continue working on it and write a bit more, and I didn't really like the song. And they were like, 'oh, come on, we'll just use it' and so I said, 'yeah all right,' just to see how it would turn out. And it ended up changed a little bit and now I'm really happy with it.
Daniel Johns
