Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Perry

Perry is smuggling a moral philosophy into what sounds like a craft note, and that blend is the point. The line starts with a shrug at "the commonplace statement" - a preemptive eye-roll that admits the idea is cliche while insisting it still does real work. In songwriting, especially, cliches are dangerous because they flatten emotion; Perry flips that risk by using the cliche as an engine. If everyone is the hero of his own story, then no one is a cardboard villain. The subtext is permission: permission to write characters who do bad things without turning the song into a sermon, and permission to inhabit a voice you don't "agree" with.

"Justification" is the tell. He doesn't say every character has a reason; he says they have a justification that is convincing to them. That's a darker, more accurate word. It suggests self-deception, rationalization, the private courtroom where we all acquit ourselves. For a musician, that's gold: a three-minute song can't litigate every motive, but it can deliver the psychological feeling of being inside someone's excuse.

Then he lands on "fun", which is disarming. It's not fun because harm is funny; it's fun because voicing a character is a safe kind of trespass. You get to try on a mind, borrow its swagger, its fear, its logic, then step back out. Contextually, it reads like a defense of empathetic imagination in an era that often confuses depicting a viewpoint with endorsing it. Perry is staking out the artist's job: not to purify people, but to make them legible.