Education Quote by Peter Hammill

A quiet provocation hides inside Hammill's polite phrasing: "I continue to believe" reads like a musician refusing to be domesticated by the market logic of taste. He’s pushing back on "given wisdom" - the unspoken industry rule that cohesion sells, that an album should behave like a single brand identity: one mood, one sonic palette, one algorithm-friendly vibe. Hammill frames the fight as aesthetic, but the subtext is economic. Homogeneity isn’t just a creative preference; it’s a packaging strategy.

The sly power of the line is how he widens the target. He’s not only defending the messy, shape-shifting album; he insists that even an "individual song" should contain multitudes. That’s a direct challenge to the idea of the track as a tidy unit designed for playlists, radio formatting, or instant comprehension. Variety means risk: tempo changes, tonal left turns, emotional contradiction, the refusal to resolve into a single feeling. It asks more of the listener, and Hammill is essentially betting that attention can still be earned, not merely captured.

Context matters: Hammill comes from prog’s heyday, where the album was a canvas and structural surprise was part of the thrill. Yet his point lands sharply now, in an era when "cohesive" often means "interchangeable". He isn’t arguing for chaos; he’s arguing for narrative friction - the kind that makes you lean in because you can’t predict what comes next.