But when you're beginning, you should try to focus on something you love and your own way of doing things.

Most bands have a sound that they're already identified with, so for the producer it becomes a process of helping them find their muse in the studio to make a record that will not only satisfy them artistically, but will also do something in the marketplace.

I had previously been in the band the Modern Lovers with Jonathan Richman.

But when you're beginning, you should try to focus on something you love and your own way of doing things.

The vocals are what immediately draw people in and sell the song.

That said, everything's important, and every musician who plays on the record is an integral part of it.

I think my voice worked out fine, but it was a lot of work for me. And I was very self-conscious about it. I was a bit self-conscious about writing lyrics too.

My other advice is to start writing songs and singing right away.

Some artists want a producer to be a kind of svengali - someone who actually creates a sound for them.

For a young band about to make a record, make sure you get the vocals right.

I think being eclectic is bad when you're just starting out.

I've become increasingly confidant in following intuitions ahead of thoughts as I produce more records.

I think we could have done a lot more great music, so I was disappointed that we didn't continue making records and touring, but it's hard to argue with 10 good years.

I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance.

I see myself as the buffer between the band and the record company.

Music has become a bigger business, and with that there is more pressure to succeed; I think that it creates a negative pressure for being creative.

Normally when I work with bands I'm trying to refine and improve what's already there.

But when youre beginning you should try to focus on something you love and your own way of doing things.

What's nice about being a producer is you get to roll the dice more often, and you get to be involved with lots of different kinds of music.

From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted.

Before beginning, plan carefully.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

The people who voted for President Obama are just beginning to wake up to exactly what they brought in. The 'change' they envisioned is not the 'change' they have gotten.

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

In the beginning it was all black and white.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

At the beginning of 1955 only about 60 percent of American homes had TVs.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Most musicians count at the beginning, and never count and talk to their musicians after that. They only talk to them at the end of the song. But I would count with them and talk.

What you really remember at the beginning was that you have to throw a budget together. We made some terrible mistakes at the beginning in my own budget that took us at least a year to catch up on.

There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens.

I am pleased to see that information campaigns, such as the America's WETLAND effort, are getting the message out, and people are beginning to realize that wetlands loss in Louisiana affects us all.

I started working on trying to sound like June from the very beginning.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.

Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.

I did all the work at the beginning up until the point where I couldn't handle the increasingly heavy art production burden alone. I needed, and got, assistance.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

You know, in the beginning when your first payroll comes up and you have to borrow money to meet the payroll, you lose sleep the night before, and you say to yourself real fast, 'Well, maybe I should keep working a couple more years. It's sobering.

I think I realized it was an art form at the beginning, but it took me a really long time before I was able to view what I was performing myself as an art form.

In the beginning I had a real work problem. Every time I had job I had to convince the immigration authorities I was the only man for that job and get a special work permit until I went under contract to MGM.

It's interesting that instead of having to get tighter and more restricted for a collaboration, strangely enough, from the beginning, we've actually been more confident that we could handle this.