Creativity Quote by Suzi Quatro

Quatro is drawing a line in the sand about authenticity, and she does it in the most musicianly way possible: by talking about physics. “A bass should sound like a bass” isn’t just gear talk, it’s a demand that the instrument keep its body. The “thump of the finger against the wood” is the giveaway. She’s not chasing a perfectly polished low end that behaves like a spreadsheet; she wants the audible evidence of contact, effort, and risk. That little percussive smack is proof that a human being is driving the groove, not smoothing it into compliance.

The phrase “like it began with stand up” reaches back to the upright bass tradition where tone is inseparable from touch. Upright players don’t just play notes; they play the instrument’s mass, the room’s air, the slap of string and fingerboard. By invoking that origin story, Quatro is pushing against a certain modern bass aesthetic: compressed, DI-clean, surgically EQ’d, the kind of low frequency that supports a track while staying politely invisible.

Context matters: Quatro broke through in an era when women instrumentalists were often treated as decorative, not authoritative. Insisting on a bass tone that’s unmistakably physical is also an assertion of presence. The subtext is control: don’t let producers, trends, or technology domesticate the instrument into a mere subwoofer. Let it speak in its own accent: woody, tactile, and unapologetically alive.