Ninety percent of my thoughts are, "How will this work on the radio?"
I've always been a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde. I always feel that you should keep singles as commercial as possible so that the people can walk down the road and whistle a song. But on the other hand on albums I think you can afford to show people what you can do.
A lot of people in Nashville think that the best song is the catchiest or the one that sells the most copies. They're editing songs in a way that make them seem more consumable, I guess. I'm trying to edit them in a way that makes them more honest.
I want to make sensible commercial films.
I don't think about how much business my films will make.
I don't want to be a small-time, independent, successful rapper.
'Boneless,' even though we were thinking about servicing it to radio, it made more sense putting a vocal on there. This was actually the first time that I really looked at doing a song for radio and kind of let go of some control and listened to a lot of different radio pluggers and had Ultra come in and help out with ideas.
The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.
When I was at Capitol - and this was not Capitol's fault - I was aiming, you know. I would listen to country radio and go, 'What version of me does radio want?'
The arrival of Beckham at Milan is not just a matter of marketing.
We don't go around the world counting ticket and record sales, nor do we glue our ears to the radio to hear what's trendy at the moment - we're not that type of band.
I don't feel I'm making a conscious effort to go more commercial.
ABC had all these schlocky, bubblegum acts, and we had to come up with suitable material for them. In which we were amazingly unsuccessful.
I don't want to focus too much on trying to write a song for radio.
There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance.
So there was a way for you to get promoted and survive as an artist without worrying about AM radio hits.
I can't be enticed by a big commercial film.
I'm not interested in artistic records for the sake of making artistic records where they're so cool no one listens to them.
The success of the first album was almost an anomaly, and it could remain a fantastic anomaly. It was not crafted for commercial success. I remember meetings with my label saying it had no radio singles. For me, the second album was a gesture of independence.
Why would we want to do an experimental album? That's just selfish.
What counts in Hollywood is box office. It doesn't really matter what people think of you as an actor because, as long as you have been in a movie that has made money, you will always get another job.
The great music for so many artists - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones - was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.
I personally don't distinguish between artistic and commercial films.
People can criticise all day long, I think I've proven myself, I think I deliver. And I agree, box office does not mean a movie's good, but I feel like I'm making good movies and I'm delivering in box office.
I think that if you go about making movies to win Oscars, you're really going about it the wrong way.
