Creativity Quote by Elliott Smith

Elliott Smith’s line lands like a shrug, but it’s the kind that carries a whole weather system. In an era when musicians were expected to mythologize cities as either salvation (New York) or authenticity (anywhere else), he refuses the script. “I don’t really like New York better than Portland” isn’t a hot take; it’s an anti-take. The sentence drains prestige from New York without making Portland into a moral alternative. That’s the point: no skyline is going to fix you.

The second half, “It’s just a different place,” is classic Smith understatement - plain words used as a shield against romance, hype, and other people’s projections. Fans and journalists love a narrative of the sensitive artist escaping one scene for another, trading small-town purity for big-city opportunity, or vice versa. Smith’s move (from Portland’s indie ecosystem to a larger, more exposed career orbit) invited exactly that kind of story. His response sidesteps it with almost stubborn neutrality.

Subtext: geography is not destiny. The line reads like someone tired of being asked to rank lives the way we rank restaurants. It also hints at a darker realism: changing locations can change your surroundings, your access, your pace, your temptations - but it won’t automatically change the internal conditions you carry. Smith’s work lives in that gap between the world’s desire for neat arcs and the messier truth of living: sometimes a “new chapter” is just a new address.