Creativity Quote by John Sebastian

There is a quiet bleakness tucked into Sebastian's casual phrasing: "viable, saleable and so on" lands like an artist's shrug at a system he knows he can't sentimentalize. He's not talking about destiny or inspiration; he's talking about market logistics. If you're "on the come" - still emerging, still unproven - the romance of discovery gets replaced by a blunt professional requirement: proximity.

The line reveals how mid-century American pop and rock functioned as geography as much as sound. New York, Los Angeles, Nashville: these weren't just scenes, they were gatekeeping machines where labels, publishers, booking agents, radio, and press formed a single ecosystem. "End up" is doing a lot of work. It suggests migration less as choice than as gravity. You don't merely visit; you relocate your life to be legible to the industry.

Sebastian's intent feels practical, almost advisory, but the subtext is an indictment of how culture gets filtered. Talent alone isn't the audition; access is. The quote also hints at the way "authenticity" gets manufactured. Musical centers don't just amplify what exists elsewhere; they reshape it, standardizing accents, smoothing edges, aligning songs with what can be packaged. That trailing "and so on" is the giveaway: the list of compromises is long enough to be tedious, and familiar enough to leave unstated.

Coming from a figure associated with the urban-folk-rock moment, it reads like a veteran's hard-earned map of the terrain: art happens everywhere, careers happen in hubs.