Creativity Quote by Chris Frantz

A modest disclaimer that doubles as a quiet flex: Frantz frames influence as something you can’t quite measure, then immediately lists the very deliberate choices that made that influence possible. The line is less about uncertainty than about control. By pointing out the absence of photos and the refusal to “promote the Talking Heads connection,” he’s describing a kind of brand hygiene that feels almost contemporary: the idea that visibility is a tool, not a default.

The context here is the tangled ecosystem around Talking Heads and its adjacent projects (most famously Tom Tom Club), where celebrity could have been an easy accelerant. Frantz is signaling an ethic that punk and post-punk prized: credibility over marketing, the work over the myth. Not putting faces on covers is an aesthetic decision, but it’s also a power move in an industry that sells personality as much as sound. If you don’t give the audience the familiar iconography, you force them to meet the music on different terms.

The subtext is also interpersonal. “Keep it separate” reads like an artistic boundary, but it hints at internal band politics and the anxiety of being treated as a side dish to a more canonized main act. Frantz is asserting that the project wasn’t a Talking Heads annex, even if the world wanted it to be. The quote works because it captures a paradox musicians still live with: you can reject the hype machine, but you’re still negotiating it every time you decide what not to sell.