'True Romance' was definitely, in part, still me finding my voice as a writer. I was nervous, and I was a lot more shy. The album sounds bruised.
I've got a song on every album, two songs as a matter of fact on every album without Auto-Tune, and that's the song that nobody talks about. It's weird.
For me, honest critique is not all about your feelings and your ear. Honest critique is sitting down with an album that you may not put on in your spare time, and really digging into that album, so you can talk about the beat selection.
When I was a kid and I bought a record, I ripped that thing open, I wanted to know who was playing what, what studio it was cut at, who was the string arranger, who was the engineer.
I think a lot of that album ["Tonight" ] is still very good . . . the songs, but I think I was indifferent to the arrangements.
Probably 90 percent of my albums have polka medleys.
All the Public Enemy albums, I knew what records they were sampling but was like, 'How'd they construct it like this?!'
I knew that 'Nothing to Lose' wasn't gonna probably go off the same way numbers-wise like 'iSpy,' but 'Nothing to Lose' was more like a statement record for me.
We made 'Wretched and Divine,' and as much as I love it, it's a pretty sparkly record - it's a record that could be done as a play because it's very theatrical with no grit.
I think, for Solange, it was important to make a super-strong direct statement with 'A Seat at the Table,' and she thought 'Cool Your Heart' was kind of a summer jam that didn't really fit.
On 'Check Your Head' and 'Ill Communication,' most of the lyrics are much more, 'OK, you take that, and I'll say that' - they're split up.
'The White Album' is a record I can go back to time and time again, and always find something different that I never noticed or appreciated before.
In Kid A and Amnesiac, the guitar becomes one more texture, difficult to separate from other textures.
I like the freedom of being able to just use the live show as an opportunity to more so deconstruct what's going on in the album than to recreate it.
