Creativity Quote by Van Morrison

Morrison’s line is a quiet manifesto against the idea of music as a product. In an era where songs are flattened into identical streams and tours can feel like branded repetitions, “Every performance is different” asserts that the real event is unrepeatable: the room, the band’s mood, the audience’s energy, even the singer’s breath that night. It’s a defense of live music as risk, not recitation. The second sentence, “That’s the beauty of it,” lands like a shrug and a dare. If you want perfection, buy the record. If you want truth, show up.

The subtext also reads as an artistic alibi. Morrison has a reputation for being mercurial onstage, sometimes leaning into improvisation, sometimes resisting the greatest-hits script audiences expect. Framed this way, inconsistency becomes integrity. He’s not promising satisfaction; he’s promising presence. That’s a power move, but it’s also an honest one: the best concerts aren’t “accurate,” they’re alive.

Context matters: Morrison comes out of a tradition where performance is a living language - jazz phrasing, blues elasticity, soul’s call-and-response. His music thrives on feel, on stretching a line until it breaks into something communal. The quote works because it flips the anxiety of unpredictability into a value system. Difference isn’t a flaw to manage; it’s the point.