Creativity Quote by Peter Hammill

There is a sly kind of self-portrait hiding in Hammill's plainspoken line: the musician as lab tech, smuggling hypothesis and jargon into the messy business of feeling. He frames it as instinct, not strategy, which matters. "Always natural" is a defense against the idea that intellectualism in rock is pretension; for him, science talk isn't a costume, it's his native tongue. That subtext reframes his work: the songs aren't trying to sound "smart", they're trying to be accurate to how his mind metabolizes experience.

The intent also nods to the particular moment Hammill came up in. Late-60s and 70s progressive rock treated the album like a serious art object, borrowing from literature, philosophy, and yes, science, as a way to outrun pop's supposed smallness. Hammill's twist is that scientific terminology isn't just decorative world-building; it can function like emotional choreography. Technical language creates distance, and distance can be a form of intimacy: you name the thing precisely because it's too volatile to touch directly.

"Push this stuff into songs" is the key verb. It suggests friction. Songs resist theory; they demand rhythm, breath, and immediate stakes. Hammill is admitting to a productive clash between systems-thinking and human mess, where clinical terms become metaphors for obsession, alienation, entropy, control. The payoff is a vocabulary that lets rock dramatize modern consciousness: a brain trained to quantify, trying to sing anyway.