Art & Creativity Quote by Martin Gore

There is a quiet flex in Martin Gore insisting he does not "write poems and put them to music". For a songwriter so often praised for literate, bruised lyricism, he’s rejecting the museum-glass idea of the "lyric" as a finished literary object that merely gets decorated with chords. The line draws a boundary between songwriting and poetry not to diminish poetry, but to protect the messier, more physical process of making pop: voice, rhythm, melody, texture, accident.

"Just let things flow" reads like anti-method, but it’s really a method with values baked in. Flow is permission to start with a phrase that feels good in the mouth before it "means" anything; permission for a synth pattern or a groove to dictate where language lands; permission for emotional truth to arrive sideways. It also sidesteps the macho myth of total control. Gore’s best work has always balanced precision with vulnerability, and the subtext here is that craft can hide inside spontaneity. You can sand the edges later; first you need the spark.

Context matters: as the principal songwriter in Depeche Mode, Gore operated in a world where electronic production could easily become sterile, where the temptation is to over-engineer. "Flow" is a guardrail against that, a reminder that the song has to breathe. It’s also a small rebuke to critics who treat pop lyrics like they’re supposed to hold up as standalone literature. In his framing, the words aren’t meant to survive without the body. They’re meant to live inside it.