Creativity Quote by Trevor Dunn

Control is a funny thing to confess in public: it sounds like a flaw until you frame it as craft. Trevor Dunn, a bassist known for thriving inside organized chaos, slips that confession into a disarming aside: "like anyone else". That little clause is the softener, the move that turns a personal compulsion into a shared human itch. He’s not asking to be seen as difficult; he’s asking to be seen as awake.

The second sentence does the real work. "I try to achieve a balance" is modest on the surface, but it’s a musician’s statement about power: who steers the song, who yields, who listens. In improvisational or experimental scenes, control is often treated like the enemy of authenticity, while surrender is romanticized as purity. Dunn cuts through that binary. Balance suggests discipline without rigidity, openness without passivity. It’s the ethos of someone who knows that "letting go" still requires technique, and that spontaneity is rarely accidental.

The intent feels practical, almost managerial: keep agency without crushing collaboration. The subtext is that control isn’t just ego; it’s responsibility. In ensembles, someone has to hold the architecture, even if they’re also willing to set it on fire at the right moment. Contextually, coming from a working musician, this reads as a survival strategy: an admission that the best art often happens in the tension between directing and being directed, between the plan and the pulse.