Time & Perspective Quote by Kathy Valentine

There is a quiet rebellion tucked inside Kathy Valentine’s plainspoken sentence. “Because usually in the past” lands like a sigh from someone who’s been typecast by success: once you’re in a “big band,” your identity gets shrink-wrapped around that brand. The line is almost defensively practical, but that’s the point. It frames fame not as a glittering peak but as a narrowing corridor where the world expects total devotion and punishes detours.

Valentine’s choice of “usually” does a lot of work. It concedes the old rules without endorsing them, implying she’s speaking from experience and weariness, not theory. “That was all I did” is both a statement of workload and a critique of how the industry (and fans, and press) can flatten an artist into a single function: bassist, Go-Go, cog in a recognizable machine. Big-band life isn’t just touring and recording; it’s being continuously available to the story of the band, even when your own story wants to branch off.

Context matters: Valentine came up in an era when women in rock were still treated as exceptions, and exceptions don’t get much slack. The subtext is about permission - who gets to have side projects, to evolve, to step away without being read as ungrateful or irrelevant. The intent feels like an explanation offered to someone asking why she’s doing something else now. The sentence answers with a boundary: I’m not only that thing anymore, and I don’t want to be.