Every album I've made is about what I'm experiencing at the time.
Break-up albums are the best kind.
All the songs on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot are the encapsulation of heterosexual love. I have different records for gay sex.
I guess I see 'Goo' half as a really New York record because I think there are a lot of really particular New York references on it, but I also see it, for us, as the first of our records that really opened up to the larger world around us.
All of my favourite albums have this incredible amount of conceptual glue to them, even if they are not telling a story.
I think the best rappers practice concept albums in their work.
I feel like there's a lot of albums that are like 'woo! we're young, let's have fun' and there's a lot of albums that are abstract, with mature lyrics.
You know, it's absolutely connected to The Mollusk in that, it's what we're writing after The Mollusk. A lot of this stuff reminds me of things on The Mollusk.
What I appreciate about Radiohead's work - and it's most evident in 'Hail to the Thief' - is how the juxtaposition of narratives on the band's albums somehow creates a sense of wholeness.
Every Dirty Projectors album is a world unto itself.
My first album, 'Englaborn,' was based on music originally written for the theatre. My solo albums, like 'IBM 1401, a User's Manual' and 'Fordlandia,' have also had narratives attached to them.
To me, a perfect album talks about the hard stuff and the fun and caring stuff.
I kind of like the idea of creating my own literature within my albums. I definitely thought about that when I started writing songs.
Each album I do, I try to have at least a slight rule, whether it's the band has to get together and record live, or all guitars, all fuzz on, all the time. It's varying and slight, but yes, I like having rules.
We just did three albums in a row of shaking our fists in the air and yelling about George W.Bush and the government. I didn't think I was going to have to do three, but the idiot kept getting reelected. I just wanted to remind people that Ministry is actually a good rock band. We can do some party stuff, too.
Even though 'Prequelle' is a record about death, essentially, it's a record about survival, and I think that that is something that's gone through all the records. Even back to 'Opus Eponymous,' there was a double meaning to things that doesn't necessarily have to do with evil sermons out of some old grimoire somewhere how to summon the devil.
If you go back to all my albums, they're all confessional.
The 'Downward Spiral' album was a record all about beating everybody up - and then 'Hurt' was like a coda saying maybe I shouldn't have done that. But to make the song sound impenetrable because I thought it was a little too vulnerable, I tried to layer it in noise.
There's so much music out there, and so many different styles that I've been influenced by, so each album reflects some of that knowledge or influence that I've had.
With albums like 'Rodeo,' 'Days Before Rodeo' and 'Owl Pharaoh,' I was really tuned into wanting to get people to understand my conscious and who I was mentally and who I am mentally.
I've got stories on every one of my albums, big ones.
It seems like on every record we have this big, epic thing like 'Rosetta,' 'Wings For Marie' or 'Lateralus.'
I've never wanted to name an album from a song title if I could avoid it because I like it to be a body of work.
Each album comes from definitely a different period in the evolution of each of us individually as creators and the role that we take in life. The external stimuli changed... so the songs are full of lots of different meanings.
