In a way, the traditional album is no longer as important as it used to be. But at the same time, I don't want to be the kind of artist who just releases one song after another.
I have been fortunate enough to record several singles and a whole album with Chet Atkins.
Music changes so fast, and we're in a singles market.
Music has changed a lot over the past few years so I believe it's necessary to adjust in order to make music the fans want to hear. If I need to release single after single instead of releasing the album, that is what I will do to reacquaint fans with who I am as an artist now.
Albums are great but for an artist like me, I don't think albums are the way to go.
I'm free to do what I please, I'm probably not going to do albums. Just because I think releasing tracks as singles is a better way for me to stay topical.
Most people didn't have the bandwidth to download whole albums. And so it brought back this cherry picking idea that the audience would focus on certain songs and possibly be the impetus behind what eventually got on AM radio: the single or whatever.
It would be really nice to be able to put out releases that wouldn't be conditional upon an album format, and just put out music in different ways.
What record companies do these days is drain the blood dry of an album, take six singles off it, and harm the longevity of artists' careers by doing it.
It used to be OK to have two or three songs out a year - and those are your singles. Now, they don't want that. They're like, 'OK, I heard that. Next!'
So much is filtered by pop music today, because the music industry is driven by single, single, single, single, the next single, not the nurturing of artists and that kind of thing.
I can do whatever I want now. I can drop seven songs in two weeks and fans don't care about whether it's from an album or not. They just care about the music.
I think the record industry has gotten to be more about labels wondering what the new single is rather than labels nurturing artists. It's gotten away from making a full album of music that someone would want to listen to all the way through.
Because Led Zeppelin weren't having to worry about doing singles, each time we went in to record, it was a body of work for an album. So you could get the shift and the movement forwards as opposed to having to be rooted back to a single that might have been done a year ago.
If you oversaturate the market with singles, then people will get sick of you.
I think some people have this thing where just because you do singles that means you're not a real artist. It's like hold on a minute - I'm selling millions of records here and been streamed billions of times... How can I not be taken as a real artist just because these songs are singles?
I may just keep releasing singles 'til I run out of music, which is kind of cool in a way - as long as people don't go, 'Oh my God, not another one!'
When Depeche Mode put out a single you knew that a week later you could go and buy the 12" and it would have six versions and they were all better.
Well, you know, back then there wasn't many albums, it was the singles. You sold singles.
If you just focus on making singles, you lose the personality of the record. Because everything is not meant to go to radio.
Putting out music as it's made, versus holding it until an album's finished, allows me to be more timely and maintain balance.
I like releasing singles because I can get them out there quickly and it's based on the changes, the sounds that are going on all around the world that I'm hearing and just a whole different bunch of influences which is sometimes hard to get across on an album because it can take a few months or a year to come along.
Big labels can buy you radio play, they can buy you social media likes and YouTube views. I don't have any of that, but I'm still getting a Top 3 album and Top 20 singles.
