Time & Perspective Quote by Al Jarreau

Jarreau’s line cuts against a stubborn American soundtrack: the idea that virtue is proven by pain. Coming from a musician whose gift was turning technical brilliance into effortless joy, it lands less like theology and more like a corrective to a cultural habit. He isn’t arguing that suffering doesn’t exist; he’s challenging the moral glamour we attach to it, especially in religious language that can make hardship feel ordained, even required.

The first sentence is conversational on purpose. “I don’t know where we got the notion…” sounds like a shrug, but it’s an indictment: this belief is learned, inherited, repeated until it feels holy. Jarreau frames it as a “notion,” not a doctrine, stripping it of authority. Then he pivots to biology - “Every living thing tends toward the good” - grounding the claim in survival rather than scripture. That move matters. It suggests that hope isn’t naive; it’s evolutionary. If life weren’t oriented toward repair, pleasure, connection, and continuity, the species would have quit long ago. “We would have been gone” is blunt, almost street-level existentialism.

The subtext is liberation. If God doesn’t “want” suffering, then people don’t have to romanticize it, endure it silently, or treat joy as suspect. For an artist whose career lived in the grooves between jazz, R&B, and pop, it’s also a statement about music’s purpose: not to sanctify misery, but to insist that aliveness leans toward light, even when the world tries to call that frivolous.