Cohesive Album 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 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.'

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.

All my records have been written to be records, rather than writing a group of songs and seeing if they fit together.

You can't have 12 records on your album and none of them sound alike. You gotta kind of have something to make them say, 'That sounds like Rakim.'

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.'

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.

It's really important to me that the songs not only stand out individually but work as a full body of work, too.

It's really important for me to have a record which has a strong narrative feel to it.

I wish more artists would do that sort of thing - just focus on one sound on a record instead of "Here's my club banger, here's my metro booming track, and then here's my Americana song." I like albums to feel like a world. That's just me.

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. I'd like to sit and work a whole record with a certain person, to come up with a concept and see it through that way.

Sometimes, I want to make a record that's so schizophrenic and so all over the place, and then other times, I want to make a record that's very coherent and very short and together.