"Everything is a battle with this band"
About this Quote
"Everything is a battle with this band" lands like a tired laugh you don’t quite mean to share. Kenny Hickey isn’t talking about some glamorous rock-and-roll chaos; he’s describing the grinding, unromantic friction that sits under a long-running group: creative tug-of-war, personality management, logistics, ego, and the slow erosion of patience when the same arguments keep reappearing in new disguises.
The line works because it’s both blunt and oddly loyal. “This band” isn’t “these people” or “those guys.” It’s a single organism he’s still inside of, even as he’s clearly exhausted by it. Calling it a “battle” reframes the daily realities of making music together as conflict rather than collaboration, but it also implies stakes: you don’t battle over something you’ve already abandoned. There’s a perverse intimacy in the complaint. You only know a fight is constant when you’ve fought it for years.
In musician-speak, “everything” is doing heavy lifting. Not just recording, touring, or decisions about sound, but the petty stuff: scheduling, money splits, gear, setlists, who talks to whom, whose mood dictates the day. It hints at how bands can become small governments with no constitution: every choice is a negotiation, every compromise a minor surrender, every win a new reason for resentment.
It’s also a quiet dismantling of the myth that chemistry is effortless. Sometimes the art survives not because the relationships are harmonious, but because the combatants keep showing up anyway.
The line works because it’s both blunt and oddly loyal. “This band” isn’t “these people” or “those guys.” It’s a single organism he’s still inside of, even as he’s clearly exhausted by it. Calling it a “battle” reframes the daily realities of making music together as conflict rather than collaboration, but it also implies stakes: you don’t battle over something you’ve already abandoned. There’s a perverse intimacy in the complaint. You only know a fight is constant when you’ve fought it for years.
In musician-speak, “everything” is doing heavy lifting. Not just recording, touring, or decisions about sound, but the petty stuff: scheduling, money splits, gear, setlists, who talks to whom, whose mood dictates the day. It hints at how bands can become small governments with no constitution: every choice is a negotiation, every compromise a minor surrender, every win a new reason for resentment.
It’s also a quiet dismantling of the myth that chemistry is effortless. Sometimes the art survives not because the relationships are harmonious, but because the combatants keep showing up anyway.
Quote Details
| Topic | Tough Times |
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