Art & Creativity Quote by Jan Hammer

Hammer’s line reads like a gentle provocation dressed up as a studio truth: stop romanticizing technique as the engine, because the engine is feeling. Coming from a musician best known for synthesizers and the sleek, high-tech sheen of the Miami Vice era, it’s a quietly radical claim. He’s talking about emotion as the hidden power source inside a process that, from the outside, can look like wiring, presets, and virtuoso control.

The intent is practical, not poetic. Hammer isn’t arguing that music should be melodramatic; he’s arguing that without an internal spark, you’re just assembling sound. “Fuel” is the key word: it suggests motion, friction, risk. Emotion isn’t an optional garnish, it’s the thing that makes you commit to a choice - one chord instead of the ten other “correct” ones, one take that’s imperfect but alive. In a world where musicians can endlessly edit, quantize, and polish, that’s a warning: perfection can be a way to avoid feeling anything.

The subtext is also a defense of authenticity that doesn’t depend on genre. Electronic music, film scoring, and instrumental work often get treated as emotionally “cold,” as if machinery cancels humanity. Hammer flips that stereotype. The tools can be synthetic; the impulse can’t. If you’re not moved, nothing moves. That’s not mysticism - it’s a creative threshold test.