15 Quotes by Norman Blake

With some of our previous records, we had songs with 14 vocal tracks and three pianos. We just wanted to strip some of that back and make a record we could (easily reproduce) live. And we achieved that. We were just in London and played the album from start to finish.

Unfortunately, I believe that we were uninformed because management and outside experts who reported to us failed to do their jobs and give us full, complete information.

There's more pressure on the melody when you don't have all the embellishments,

It was sort of liberating in a way. We had to concentrate on arranging the tracks, we couldn't embellish them needlessly.

That sounds too much like hard work for us.

All you can do is make the records, and hope a group of people will pick up on it, and it will become the received wisdom that that's the record to buy, ... Because that's kind of how the music business works, isn't it? You think of the Coldplay record or something like that. The received wisdom is that you should have that on your coffee table, if you buy one record every two months or whatever.