Creativity Quote by Dan Hawkins

Restlessness hums under the politeness here. Dan Hawkins isn’t just praising scrappy newcomers; he’s side-eyeing the machinery that makes them scrappy in the first place. “I can’t wait” reads like impatience with an industry that’s always promising a ladder and mostly handing out trapdoors. The dream isn’t fame-by-proxy. It’s infrastructure: “start something up myself” signals a DIY corrective, the musician’s version of institutional reform.

The phrase “unsigned bands” is doing heavy cultural work. It names a class of artists defined not by sound but by paperwork, a reminder that legitimacy in music is still often conferred by contracts, not audiences. Hawkins positions exposure as a kind of fairness, but the subtext is sharper: the system extracts value from hunger. “Travel so far” and “the smallest gig they’ve ever played” sketch a familiar touring humiliation - long drives, tiny rooms, maybe a half-functioning PA - where effort and reward are grotesquely out of proportion.

That’s why the line lands. It’s compassionate without being sentimental, and it’s specific enough to feel lived-in. The kicker is “they deserve,” a moral claim in a business that prefers to talk in metrics. Hawkins is arguing that enthusiasm and grit shouldn’t be treated as renewable resources to burn through. He’s also hinting at a different kind of gatekeeping: artists helping artists, building platforms that don’t require permission from labels, radio, or algorithmic curators.

In the background you can hear the mid-2000s-to-now shift: bands no longer just chase deals; they build ecosystems. Hawkins wants to turn backstage empathy into a public-facing engine.