Daily Inspiration Quote by Nobuo Uematsu

The charm of Nobuo Uematsu's line is how politely it shuts down a box people keep trying to fit him into. "Certainly" reads like a small bow before the correction, a composer using good manners as a blade. And the correction matters: he is not rejecting Celtic music so much as refusing the lazy narrative that his sound equals one easily labeled tradition.

Uematsu is a Japanese game composer who became globally famous writing music that could feel ancient, pastoral, and "European" without actually belonging to any single European lineage. For years, fans and interviewers have heard tin whistles, modal melodies, and folk-like rhythms in Final Fantasy and concluded: Celtic. The quote pushes back on that shortcut. It's a reminder that what people call "Celtic" in pop culture often means "vaguely old-world, wistful, and melodic" - an aesthetic category, not a musicological one.

The subtext is about authorship and credit. Uematsu's work is eclectic by design: rock, classical, Japanese pop, church-like harmony, film-score grandiosity, folk colors used as texture rather than identity. Saying his "only interest" isn't Celtic music quietly insists on the breadth of his listening and the intentionality behind his pastiche. It's also a comment on how Western audiences can exoticize influence in reverse: assuming a Japanese composer reaching for fantasy must be borrowing from a single, romanticized European source.

It's a boundary-setting sentence that still keeps the door open: yes, Celtic elements may be there. No, they don't get to be the whole story.