Art & Creativity Quote by Gary Wright

There’s a quiet grief baked into Gary Wright’s nostalgia: not for a genre or a decade, but for an infrastructure that treated artists like long-term bets instead of disposable content. When he says artists were “nurtured,” he’s talking about time - the rare luxury to be awkward in public, to make a few imperfect records, to find a voice while someone else footed the bill. The word choice is parental, almost tender, and it’s doing work: it frames creativity as something grown, not manufactured.

The second sentence flips that warmth into a more unsettling claim. “Their music was developed by the record companies” is both an endorsement and an indictment. In the ’70s, labels weren’t just distributors; they were gatekeepers with studios, producers, A&R staff, tour support, and the patience to shape an artist into a coherent proposition. Wright’s subtext is that this wasn’t pure artistic freedom - it was guided, sometimes aggressively. Development meant editing, steering, polishing. It also meant leverage: the company could invest, and therefore control.

Coming from a musician who lived through peak label power, the line reads like a contrast to today’s attention economy, where artists are expected to arrive fully formed, algorithm-ready, and constantly self-promoting. Wright isn’t romanticizing corporate benevolence so much as mourning the loss of a middle layer: experienced tastemakers and resources that could turn raw talent into lasting work. The irony is sharp: the era he misses was shaped by companies, yet it produced music that feels more human because it was allowed to take time.