Artist Selection Quotes

You can look at someone and get to know their music and say, 'This is someone who I want to work with.'

There are people that bring artists to me to look at it and it's a question of whether I like their music and their look and if I think there's something they have that makes them different and commercial.

I'm guilty of being perceived as having narrow taste. I went after the artists that I thought were important - Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen and stuff.

We've had a problem finding a vocalist. We have not been lucky yet to find the one. I think the problem is that the three of us have such a pedigree of vocalist, that if we come out with someone that's not good we'll obviously be slated!

Usually, the song will tell me who it belongs to. It seems clear to me who would do a good job with it, who it suits.

It depends on the time of the year and who I've been talking to, I try to put people in the studio I like.

I create the music, and if this artist could complement this record, I reach out.

I wouldn't say I worked with these people because I was looking for a particular vocal sound. I worked with them because I loved what they had done before-and because they really wanted to work with me.

When you put a tour together you really just think about who you'd like on your bill, who would make sense and who you would want to live with basically for a couple months and be around with and work with.

Sometimes I'll write a song first and then I'm like, "Oh this person will be great on this song." But there are some artists I know what want, like off the top I knew I wanted Brandy and Faith Evans. Their music is like the soundtrack to my life, so it was a personal thing for me. So once they said yes, I wrote songs specifically for them.

There are a lot of artists who've said they'd like to work with me. To be honest, I'm not sure there is such a thing as an inappropriate artist. The trick is matching the artist with a story.

I love working with the singers. I love just finding them.

If you're going to use standards as criteria for signing musicians, you can sign thousands. If you're going to use some sort of conceptual interpretation that's based on the tradition of those standards, but is trying to move away from it, you're down to about 10 people or so.

I didn't form a group to perform Cilla Black songs.

I just put people on my records that I think bring something really unique to the song, and that's what's going to make it live over time. Not the fact that an artist might be 'hot' at the time.

I put together amazing records, whether that's finding the beat or putting the right hook on there, and picking the right artists on the record. That's me being an A&R. And I'm making sure that they give me their best.

I'm not sure how writers and artists of other graphic novels join forces, but this is how the process worked for me: First, I produced my final script. Then, Mark Siegel, my editor at First Second, assembled information about 10 or 12 different artists and had me look through their portfolios to see what kind of styles appealed to me.

At the moment, I have it planned as a six or seven year experiment, but the books will only ever appear in bursts like this every couple of years and only with the best quality artists.

Every label thinks, when they sign someone, 'This is the perfect pedigree to sign. They're cute, they can sing, they can dance, et cetera.' And they say to the public, 'Here, this is what you're gonna like.' But you might say, 'No, I don't like that!' You'll probably say 'no' many more times than you'll say 'yes!'

It's so important which musicians we choose for being in the orchestra.

I heard during our label-searching that some labels hire statisticians instead of A&R people. They'll reach out to the bands that will statistically perform best monetarily instead of going out to shows and having an opinion on which music is good or bad.

There's no particular method or course of action that I take in order to decide who I'm going to work with besides feeling complete and total respect and admiration for that artist.

There's never been a song that I just wrote and tried to send to an artist.

It's understandable that the music companies that are comprised of people that are successful by making good creative decisions - they have to decide which out of fifty artists is the next hot one, with no data to go from. It's an intuitive process, and that's what they do well when they're successful. They don't understand technology.

The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person that's gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates. And there's not enough information to do that - it's an intuitive process.