Creativity Quote by Nick Lowe

Elvis Costello didn’t just show up with songs; he showed up with a posture. Nick Lowe’s line, tossed off with the breezy certainty of someone who was there, is really a diagnostic of why Costello hit so hard in the late 70s: the music mattered, but the stance was the delivery system. “A brand new bag” nods to pop’s recycle-and-refresh engine (and winks at James Brown), framing Costello as an old idea made dangerous again. New wave as hand-me-downs, made sharp.

Calling him “a musician” sounds like praise until you hear the implied contrast: plenty of players can play; fewer can project a worldview in three minutes. Lowe is pointing to that elusive mix of competence and character that punk-adjacent scenes prized. Costello had chops, yes, but he also had the weaponized affect: the bespectacled scrapper, the aggrieved romantic, the guy who sounds like he’s arguing with the song as it’s happening. That’s “attitude” as craft, not just swagger.

The subtext is generous and slightly competitive, too. Lowe helped produce early Costello, and this reads like a producer’s proud recognition of a client who understood the assignment: in an era suspicious of virtuosity, you had to smuggle musicianship back in under a sneer. Lowe’s sentence captures a cultural pivot point when authenticity wasn’t about purity; it was about conviction, timing, and the right kind of glare.