Sometimes I'd hear things on other people's records and I say I wanted it on my records, but Leslie Kong said, no, it wasn't right and that it wasn't my style.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
They told me I should be making my own records. So I figured, 'why not?
All my records have been written to be records, rather than writing a group of songs and seeing if they fit together.
I don't make records that way, where I'm trying to please the marketplace or anything. Not because I have anything against that, it's just never been a part of my aesthetic, even when I was with the Pixies.
People are really set in their ways in how they produce records, and I was at least open enough to where I knew I wanted to do something totally different.
Sometimes you make a record that is what you want to hear. I've made a couple of those, idealized creations of what I wanted to hear. Then there are records that are what you feel.
Everybody told me that if I insisted on doing rockabilly music, I'd never have a chance of selling any records. In fact, I lost count of how many people told me to ditch it all together, in favour, I guess, of sounding like everybody else.
You have all these song titles and song time, and you put it in a certain order, and you slap a cover on it. That's a record. That's how I've seen all my records.
It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don't sell that many records.
People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn't copy my style from anybody.
I never sought out a record deal. It caught me with my pants down. I was just a musician doing my thing, I didn't even send my records out.