Creativity Quote by Joanna Newsom

A vow and a confession sit inside those six words. Always suggests a life organized around attention; trying admits that the work resists completion. For Joanna Newsom, whose songs braid long-lined narratives with harp architectures and uncommon diction, writing is less a burst than a climate she chooses to live in. The line rejects the myth of effortless inspiration and replaces it with a picture of sustained inquiry: collecting images on a walk, testing a cadence at the instrument, sifting a stanza until the sense locks with the sound.

Her catalog shows why trying matters. Albums like The Milk-Eyed Mender, Ys, Have One On Me, and Divers do not feel dashed off; they feel researched, argued with, revised. The melodic turns are precise, the rhythms conversational yet intricate, the references layered. Gaps between releases often get read as silence, but the assertion of always reframes those intervals as the slow geology of craft. It is the promise that even when public output pauses, interior labor continues.

Trying also names an ethic. It carries humility and persistence, a refusal to equate worth with speed or volume. In a culture that rewards constant visibility, the quieter practice of listening, reading, and rewriting is a kind of resistance. The phrase honors false starts, dead ends, and the patient accretion of meaning. It recognizes that music and language are not mined so much as courted.

There is a physical dimension, too. Writing on a harp involves problem-solving: how to voice a line so the hands can execute it, where to place a word so a resonance blooms and not smears. The line signals a balance between discipline and receptivity, method and miracle. To be always trying is to be perpetually apprenticed to the next sentence and the next note, letting life feed the work and letting the work sharpen the gaze with which life is seen.