Album Cohesion Quotes

It's easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

I've always thought that whether I'm writing or not, I've gotta pick the best songs, whether or not they're mine. I'm not gonna sing them just because I wrote them. I've gotta find the best songs to make the best record I can.

I wanted to make an album that plays from the top to bottom and feels together and complete. That's just something that felt important.

I remember I heard it in an interview with Michael Jackson one day, saying the art is gone, everybody makes records just to make a record. See, I always want the artist that try to build a whole body of music on one album, so you can enjoy it. So you could say, 'I went with him here, I went with him here.'

I know as a consumer I want a story. I want a defining - I don't want just an album full of singles. I want to get to know the artist beyond what everyone else can hear on the radio.

All of my favourite albums have this incredible amount of conceptual glue to them, even if they are not telling a story.

I wanted 'Imitations' to be a fully realized record from start to finish, with a cohesive sound and a sequence that took you from one song to the other, just like I would with a record of original stuff.

Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year.

However, there's no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.

I'm a fan of records you get and you listen to them from beginning to finish - records where everything is there for a purpose. There was never any filler on those records - it was all well planned out.

There are albums that I like because of specific songs, but then there are albums that I like as a complete body of work. 'Ghetto Fabolous' is an album I lived with daily.

I don't do filler songs. I don't get them. They don't make any sense to me. Why would I literally waste my time on a song that doesn't hold up to the same standards as the other songs on the album? I won't play it live.

A lot of people put out albums with sort of crappy songs and a couple of singles because they know no one's going to listen to it anyway. We very much wanted it to be something that you do listen to from beginning to end and had a narrative that was important.

I always want to put out an album when I know what it's going to be about. I don't want to throw in all these random songs and say, 'Okay, that's an album.'

I would never do an album with 10 songs like 'Jump Start' on it. I'll only go so far to please fans.

A good album should be more than the sum of its parts.

The Soft Machine's 'Volume Two' inspired me heavily. That record just feels like it was all done in the same breath. It's genius, and it's silly at times. But I love the fact that every time I listen to it, I listen from the beginning and want to play it out.

But you know, I really like to present the songs on an album as a story, as something thematic, rather than something you'd put on a random shuffle.

I think a lot of electronic musicians are drawn to starting with texture because the whole reason we're working with electronics is to try to create new sounds or sounds that cannot be created acoustically. When you're doing that, it's nice to be able to just create a different palette for every single song. I feel like a lot of electronic music sounds like...Each album sounds like a compilation more than it does a band.

I think it's down to our songs - we've always made sure every song on every album works.

One Long Year was just a song here and there, and it was meant to reflect the mood that I was in but unfortunately it also reflected too little of any particular thing rather than hanging together as a whole album.

So many times nowadays it's about having two good songs on an album and a bunch of filler, and I wanted to make something that I felt every song on the album was fun for everybody.

I don't want to do one of those records where it's like a compilation of a bunch of all sorts of rappers on my beats. I don't find those to be focused albums.

Some bands sound like one song the whole album through. We've been all over the place because we are punk, hardcore, rock n' roll, metal, reggae - and I think sometimes it might be too much diversity, and kids are lost.

You have to ration your creativity over all your songs. You write a really cool pop song then you have to write a heavy song to balance out, then you need to think about singles.