I hadn't been a recording artist all that long when albums came on the scene, and I was one of the first singers to point the way to how varied an album's contents could be.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
An album is such a personal thing. It's something I always wanted to do. It's me doing me, singing as me.
Albums are like diaries. You go through phases, technically and emotionally, and they reflect the state that you're in at the time.
I think too many artists from my era tend to just stamp out a record.
The first album was a very successful record. It made me very visible and it's an immediate association, but I don't do that anymore. Now I'm true to myself as an artist again. I'm more vocally oriented.
It's like whether you're in a huge movie or you've just recorded an incredible album you've got to do the next thing, and that's part of being an artist.
I picked and co-wrote the songs that if I was a guy who would be spending my hard-earned money buying an album I would want to hear.
Our albums just tend to be collections of songs really, because we all write in the group, all four of us.
Really the only thing holding a lot of records together is the personality of the singer, and the will to write all of these different things.
I could have done a hundred songs, really. It was hard to narrow them down, because I tried to pick songs for the most part that actually did have some effect on me or influenced me in the past.
I think that it can be said of a lot of artists, and myself included, that we made the same record over and over from the beginning.