Creativity Quote by Martin Gore

Martin Gore’s line doubles as a boundary and a gift: don’t make me pin this song to a corkboard, because the pin kills what made it alive. As a songwriter in a band whose catalog thrives on ambiguity, sensuality, and unease, Gore is protecting the emotional voltage of his work from the flattening effect of official explanation. The “always hate” is telling - not a casual preference but a practiced aversion, the fatigue of being asked to translate a private impulse into a clean anecdote that will fit an interview column.

The subtext is an argument about ownership. Gore admits the songs “mean something” to him, but he refuses the author-as-referee role where his meaning becomes the final ruling. That second clause - “for other people, they’ll mean something absolutely different” - isn’t diplomatic modesty; it’s a creative philosophy. Pop music survives by becoming portable. The moment a listener grafts a track onto a breakup, a confession, a night drive, it stops being the artist’s diary and starts functioning as a tool.

Context matters: Depeche Mode’s audience has long treated their lyrics like scripture, scanning for biography, politics, and intent. Gore’s answer resists both gossip and canon. He’s saying the real contract of songwriting isn’t explanation, it’s resonance - the deliberate space where listeners can insert themselves. The refusal becomes part of the art: an insistence that mystery isn’t evasiveness, it’s the mechanism that lets a three-minute song hold a thousand lives.