Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Smith

There is something quietly unnerving about Robert Smith saying a song becomes "more real" each time he plays it. Pop tends to sell songs as snapshots: a moment of feeling captured once, then replayed like a photograph. Smith flips that. For him, performance is not reproduction; its the engine that manufactures reality. The repetition doesnt drain meaning, it thickens it.

That lands with particular force coming from the frontman of The Cure, a band whose catalogue lives in the afterglow of obsession: longing you cant tidy up, heartbreak you keep touching to see if it still hurts. In that universe, a song isnt a confession sealed in a studio. Its a ritual. The lyric becomes truer not because it documents the past more accurately, but because it keeps being re-entered. Every gig is a small act of time travel where memory is refreshed, revised, and re-felt until it starts to outrank whatever originally happened.

The subtext is also about identity. When youve spent decades singing the same lines, you start to wonder who is shaping whom: the artist writing the song, or the song writing the artist. Smiths phrasing hints at that strange bargain of a long career, where the work becomes a parallel life you have to live onstage. "More real" is both romantic and slightly claustrophobic: the performance doesnt just express emotion, it can replace it.