>From the mouth of SIQUOMB herself in the Borders Crossing interview earlier this year: BC: You said earlier that you approached songwriting the way a painter does. Can you articulate the relationship between the painting and the songwriting? It's obviously a very close one for you. JM: That's a huge question. Let me break it down. For instance, with music. At the time I began, recording artists required a creature called the producer. The producer is hired by the record company to act as a liaison and he oversees your work. Musicians accept this; everybody looks for a hot producer they can laminate themselves to for greater commercial success. BC: And producers can - and do - radically change the sound of the music. JM: Absolutely. I refused to use a producer from the beginning. David Crosby pretended to produce my first record but basically that was to keep others away so they wouldn't turn my music into something else. He basically preserved the integrity of the first album. BC: What about the close relationship you've had with Larry Klein? JM: That's different; it's private and it's something that happened later. But after the first record, which David pretended to produce, I made 13 albums without a producer. There's not even a producer's credit. That's the thinking of an art student. If you're in art school, nobody would come up and put a mark on your canvas. It is my work, and be damned if anybody is going to put a mark on it. Whatever your reason to make it something else. It isn't my music and if it isn't my music, then I'm being slapped by my piano teacher again. You're going to kill my love of it and it won't go the distance. I knew what a good performance was, so in order to protect my music for the second time I worked with just an engineer. I brought the albums in cheap enough and they sold enough that the company made a profit. The moment they don't make their profits, they're definitely going to sic a producer on you. The idea was to make them fast, make them cheap, but make them the way I wanted. I even had included in my contract that I had the final say on my music. This is unique within the music business and it represents the willfulness of a painter. When I married Larry Klein he was a bass player, but inside our marriage he became a producer. Then he started hanging around in my sessions and that's the main reason why we divorced. Full article can be found at http://www.jmdl.com/articles/docs/0102bc.cfm
