Creativity Quote by John Cale

John Cale describes a demographic shift that’s less about cultural destiny than about distribution. The “sudden” youth turnout isn’t framed as a mysterious groundswell of cool; it’s logistics catching up with artistry. Records “selling more” doesn’t just mean higher numbers in a ledger. It means the music escaped the bottleneck of geography and scene gatekeeping, traveling into bedrooms, cars, and adolescence. Young listeners don’t need to be in the right city or know the right people; they just need access. Cale is sketching how fandom forms when the work becomes portable.

The key phrase is “following our careers.” He’s not talking about a hit single converting casual listeners. He’s talking about the long-view consumer: the audience that treats an artist’s catalog like a narrative. That’s a subtle flex and a sober observation. A wider age “spread” suggests a band or project moving from subculture artifact to shared reference point, the moment when a once-specific sound becomes a generational handoff. Older listeners carry the original context; younger ones arrive with fewer constraints, hearing influence and invention without the baggage of the era’s arguments.

There’s also an implicit admission about the machinery: the audience didn’t simply “get it” all at once. The market made it easier to get. Cale, ever the realist, points to the unromantic engine behind cultural rediscovery: availability, visibility, and the slow compounding interest of recorded work.