Creativity Quote by Melissa Auf der Maur

The sting in “I don’t want a record company, but I need one, unfortunately” is how cleanly it captures a musician’s most common bargain: artistic autonomy traded for infrastructure. Auf der Maur isn’t romanticizing the “sellout” narrative or posing as a martyr. She’s naming a practical dependency that feels almost structural, like paying rent. The “unfortunately” does the real work: it’s not rage, it’s resignation, the kind that comes from having tested the limits of DIY and realizing where the bottlenecks live.

The intent is blunt honesty, but the subtext is a critique of how credibility gets packaged. A record company isn’t just money; it’s access to studios, radio, touring support, distribution, publicists, and the old gatekeeping machine that decides what gets amplified. When she says she doesn’t want one, she’s gesturing at the costs: creative notes framed as “marketability,” release schedules that don’t match the art, ownership terms that treat songs like collateral. When she says she needs one, she admits that visibility still has toll booths, especially in rock scenes where touring and promotion are expensive, and where being “independent” can mean being invisible.

Context matters: Auf der Maur comes out of the late-90s/early-2000s alt-rock ecosystem, adjacent to big label power even as indie identity is prized. It’s a moment when artists are told to be brands and entrepreneurs, yet the ladder is still owned by institutions. The line lands because it refuses the fantasy that talent alone wins; it’s about leverage, and how rarely musicians have it.