Creativity Quote by Les Baxter

It lands like a shrug, but it’s really a tiny autopsy of how pop culture keeps score. Les Baxter isn’t confessing artistic failure so much as diagnosing bad timing: he made a “Broadway album” in a year when the market’s oxygen supply - recognizable hits - simply wasn’t there. The operative word is “unfortunately,” which turns taste into weather. You don’t control it; you just get caught in it.

Coming from a mid-century musician who worked in the commercial bloodstream of American sound, the line reads as a pragmatic musician’s aside that also exposes the machinery. A Broadway record isn’t merely an artistic statement; it’s a packaging strategy, a way of translating the theater’s prestige into living-room consumption. That strategy relies on titles people already hum. Without “hits,” the album loses its built-in narrative and the listener loses the easy entry point. Baxter is acknowledging that audiences often buy familiarity, then congratulate themselves for buying culture.

There’s also a subtle defense embedded in the complaint. He implies the material was fine; the problem was the ecosystem. In one sentence, he separates craft from chart fate, and reveals how quickly a musician’s reputation can be mistaken for the era’s playlist.

The irony is that it’s a Broadway album - the art form most associated with the idea of “standards” - yet Baxter frames its success as hostage to the short-term churn of hits. That tension, between durability and trend, is the whole story hiding in the aside.