Parenting & Family Quote by Jimmy Carl Black

There is a stubborn, almost scrappy optimism baked into Jimmy Carl Black's matter-of-fact recollection: the dream doesn't die, it just gets rescheduled around diaper changes, custody calendars, and the slow paperwork of adulthood. The line lands because it refuses the standard rock narrative of uninterrupted ascent. Instead, it frames the "musical career" as something you can put down like a tool, then pick back up once the family obligations are "pretty much" handled and the marriage has ended. That "pretty much" is doing a lot of work: it signals lingering messiness, the reality that parenting doesn't conclude so neatly, even if the speaker needs it to for the story to move forward.

The subtext is about reinvention under constraint. Divorce isn't presented as tragedy or liberation; it's treated as a logistical pivot point, the moment the bandwidth returns. That blunt pragmatism is culturally telling. It punctures the romantic myth that artists are always artists first, and admits that for working musicians - especially outside the superstar tier - creativity competes with bills, relationships, and time.

Then comes the kicker: "Going for the big record deal and all of that". The phrase "and all of that" carries both hope and a wink. It's aspirational, but also faintly skeptical, as if the speaker has seen the machinery up close and knows how much fantasy is packed into that one shiny objective. The intent isn't to glamorize the comeback; it's to normalize it, and in doing so, quietly critique how our culture only celebrates artistic ambition when it's young, clean, and conveniently uninterrupted.