| Am I Alone in This? Bill Bottrell in the January 2001 New Settler |
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things, and my son was running around playing and astonishingly, apparently, he walked all the way down to the cliffs, which are 1/3rd of a mile away, and fell off. It was said he was going swimming. But that never made much sense to me. . . That's as far as I need to go . . . Were you the age of your daughters when songs began to come to you full-blown? I'm not a musician and don't know how it works, that mind. BILL: No, I'm a real late bloomer as a song writer. I worked more in the technical side-as an engineer and producer. I knew sound and I knew instruments and I knew how to put a record together and make a pop record. And somewhere in the middle, I'd done it for the biggest. -It was just a curve, a classic career curve, starting with doing exercise albums, music for supermarket commercials, and then |
from '74 to about '87, ending up working with the biggest stars in recording in LA. What was it about your way of producing that attracted people like Madonna. How do you characterize your verve? BILL: What that might have been is that she thought I had an originality, and brought a street or progressive element to it. And even though I'm on the technical side, I'm always creative and the likes of Michael Jackson and Madonna, they wanted me. Michael Jackson started leaving me alone in the room with nothing to do for days and weeks at a time, in a recording studio-the implication being I had to come away from just the knobs and speakers and get back into instruments, which I hadn't done since high school. And that took me back |