Quotes from Tony Visconti

Oh, it was so hard to leave Paris, just about my favorite city in the world.

I keep reviewing my feelings about the supernatural.

When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father's guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.

My profession is called record production.

Originally a record producer more or less hired a bunch of professionals to participate in a recording session, the performers and the technicians, and a music director was put in charge. That directly related to a film producer's job.

Since my teen years I was interested in martial arts.

My dad's sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal - his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.

You could make some great sounds with technology. That's what recording is all about. What happens in the studio is very magical, and should be, in my opinion.

I am not a creature of habit.

I make records with an open mind, I always have.

But some great records are are being made with today's technology and there are still great artists among us. Likewise there are artists today who are so reliant on modern technology, they wouldn't have emerged when recording was more organic.

In the last 17 years of his working life, my father was finally rewarded with having landed a great job as first, a maintenance engineer, and then a senior locksmith with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Rock and Roll has certainly tried to take its toll on me. I'd rather not talk about my past excesses here, although some hardcore rockers might argue that those excesses were responsible for some great records, but I know which side I came out on.

In August most of Europe goes on holiday.

I love Logic Audio and have been using it for years. All my track outputs used to come up on my old board in the same order as in the old Mac G4 - 1 through 32, came up as 1 through 32, for instance.

Marc Bolan had inspired so many people to pick up a guitar and join a band.

Today a record producer is even more involved and is often the production's sole musician, one person playing all the instruments one-by-one.

We always started these albums as making demos, that went right on until Scary Monsters.

Finally, I would like to remind record companies that they have a cultural responsibility to give the buying public great music. Milking a trend to death is not contributing to culture and is ultimately not profitable.

Our last jam session was this past Christmas. Dad played his harmonica, mom sang in English and Italian, and I played guitar. I'm so happy that we could share that musical experience for one last time.

Now I know what it's like to be a rock star. No, I didn't sleep with 5 groupies at once. But I was interviewed about 45 times in 5 days in 3 cities.

Despite a few really bad days we had quite a lot of fun making Low, especially when all the radical ideas were making sense and things were starting to click.

I also mixed David Bowie's Young Americans album in 5.1 earlier this year and it will be available very soon. Even the original stereo mixes have been re-mastered and sound amazingly good, better than ever, in fact!

I am flying back to New York as I write this. I will never forget these wonderful 35 days and I would go back to Copenhagen in a heartbeat to work there again.