I think it’s always the same no matter what genre. You’re always looking for somebody who has vision and somebody who’s original and who’s not afraid to take chances. They scare you a bit because they’re always a bit ahead of you which is what you want, so you have to at times just keep your mouth shut, and other times if you have the right dialogue and you have the right words, throw it out there. Smart artists will listen. They might not do it, but they’ll listen, and if there’s something, if there’s a germ of an idea, even a bad idea, but part of it that’s good, they’ll take it and run with it.

So my sense was always to try to do that and try to be as supportive as possible, and talk to artists who I knew, or who I hoped anyway were a step ahead of me. That could take whatever conversation we would have and make something better based on that conversation. If I could do that it was fantastic, and that never changed.

To me, and I’ve said it before, if you don’t have an artist roster that is one step ahead of the record company, the record company is going to be in trouble somewhere along the line.

We listened whether it was at Warner’s or later on at Dreamworks when we started Dreamworks we had an A and R staff that we built, and that was the first thing we did because it was, in our minds, Mo, myself, and Michael Ostin, when we started Dreamworks the most important thing. Have the people who understood music, or at least understood artists who could be out there finding things that were interesting for us, and we set the standard. We could sit down and have A and R meetings. A and R meetings were flawed and I always felt they were sort of impossible, but the philosophy came through in A and R meetings. So the A and R people understood by hearing us judge other things or hearing our concerns about things that they would bring in, whether it was too much like something else or it wasn’t original enough or whatever the adjectives were that we used; it set a tone for the philosophy of the company, and we tried to have that.

Well what you want is some kind of balance. I couldn’t do it all, there’s no way, no one person could. So you’re always looking for somebody who has a different take and some people have great sense in certain areas whether it’s pop music or hip hop for whatever. You don’t want to be all things to all people, but if you have somebody whose really smart in a particular area, and you believe in that person, an A and R person whose creative enough to find something that’s really interesting, then you listen and that’s what you look for in building a company.

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