I'm mainstream, and I have pretty chart-tastic tastes. I don't often veer away from a big melodic song with big words for big stadiums.
If you listen to the radio for a whole hour there's maybe one decent song. The rest is mass-produced garbage
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.
Pop music will never be low brow.
When I started making music, I made music in a very commercial space and I didn't have room to really explore things on my own terms. It took me awhile to create a little bubble where I could explore other things, and new things. When I did that, my tools were songwriting and arranging.
Major labels act as banks in terms of how they produce and release your album. No major label is really good or bad; they just 100 per cent operate as a business, which makes sense... no hard feelings.
I have always been a singer/songwriter, and I was pushed in places I didn't want to do, like pop or top forty. I don't belong there.
Spice Girls appealed to little girls. It wasn't good music - mums would buy the albums for their kids - it was all about the gimmicks.
I think that music is still art, even if it's commercialised.
Have you listened to the radio lately? Have you heard the canned, frozen and processed product being dished up to the world as American popular music today?
It's like, on my solo stuff, every single person who buys the record, gets it. On the other stuff, the masses... when you have a hit on the radio, not everyone's going to get it. They are going to buy it for the hit.
I naturally make commercial music: it's never been a calculated decision to make pop music. I'm a genuine pop music fan.
I don't trust songs that can be played at a kid's party and a club at the same time. I just don't think it's right. There's something reptilian about that.
I love commercial music! I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business. But without any thought, I just enjoy it. It's folk music. That's what I'm doing, folk music. I'm not intellectualizing it . . . and making it into a phoney art form. I'm just doing the music I enjoy.
There are certainly good examples of incredibly brilliant, beautiful music that has been made commercially available and sold everywhere. But I would say that, for the most part, quantity certainly does not speak well for quality.
I'm a B-boy at heart. I still like rhyming. It's just the radio game is like Chinese arithmetic. It's hard to know what nuts to crack. But I still love music, been dropping music. Never stopped, really.
I really do listen to all types of music, not only rock, but everything from good pop music - which is usually older pop music - to R&B and indie rock. I love indie rock more than a lot of the commercial stuff that you'd expect.
I don't think 'pop' should mean that you had no talent.
There are plenty of bands who never get in the charts and it doesn't mean that they're not any good. Actually, a lot of the top ten is filled with stuff that just sounds the same. I could guess what's in there now - probably a bit of GaGa, Beyonce and some U.S. R&B males.
I like all music. Well, I don't like music that was created to make money. I don't really like bands that don't write their own music.
Right now I'm listening to a lot of Top 40 music, because THAT'S MY JOB.
I enjoy music that is commercial. I think that in order for music to be heard in a lot of different situations, you have to always consider that. Commercial music, for the most part, is popular music, and you always have to keep that in mind. It's not so much financial as making sure it gets the shot and is heard on the radio.
The 'music industry' is not a term I use. I tend to concentrate on music, and the music business is something different.
I just could not believe that 30 years later we're still looking at people who are supposed to write little 2-minute pop that when they actually try to do something that's a little bit more they regard it as pretentious.
I am a pop girl! And I'm on a major label. I enjoy singing pop songs.
