Creativity Quote by Mick Taylor

Freshness, in Mick Taylor's mouth, isn't some mystical muse-talk; it's logistics with a pulse. "I do to keep things sounding fresh" has the clipped, workmanlike feel of a player who's lived inside the machinery of touring: same rooms, same songs, same tempos, night after night. The trick isn't reinvention so much as refusing to let repetition calcify into autopilot. When he adds, "Sometimes just changing the running order of the show is a good idea", he demystifies creativity into a small, tactical adjustment that can jolt everyone awake.

The intent is practical: protect the music from becoming a museum piece, protect the band from boredom, protect the audience from a performance that sounds like it was assembled on an assembly line. The subtext is about control. In rock, especially in legacy contexts Taylor is associated with, setlists can become sacred objects, policed by expectation and nostalgia. Reordering the show is a quiet rebellion: not rewriting the catalog, but reasserting that the songs are still alive, still capable of surprise.

Context matters here. Taylor came up in an era when bands stretched songs onstage, let nights differ, and treated the live show as a place for risk. His emphasis on "running order" points to pacing as an instrument: tension, release, momentum, the psychological arc that makes familiar material feel newly urgent. It's a musician admitting that "fresh" is less about new notes than about new attention.