Creativity Quote by Tom Glazer

Restless curiosity is being framed here as both a gift and a mild self-indictment. Tom Glazer, a musician known less for rock-star mythmaking than for craft, teaching, and the quiet labor of folk and children’s music, is admitting to a temperament that keeps pulling him outward: another song, another subject, another rabbit hole. The phrase "perhaps too many" lands like a friendly wince. It’s not false modesty so much as an artist naming the cost of breadth: attention is finite, and diffuse attention can feel like a moral failing in a culture that rewards specialization.

The admiration he expresses for the monomaniacs - those who "concentrate on only one fixed discipline" - is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s praise for focus. Underneath, it’s a confession of envy for the clean narrative that specialists get: mastery you can point to, a legacy that scans in a sentence. Glazer’s career sits in a different lane, one where versatility and responsiveness matter, where being useful to a community (schools, stages, recordings, activism-adjacent folk circles) can outrank the solitary pursuit of a single aesthetic breakthrough.

The line also reads as an early, pre-digital version of a modern anxiety: the sense that having many interests might mean never fully arriving anywhere. Glazer doesn’t resolve that tension; he dignifies it. His intent feels less like a plea for self-help and more like an honest portrait of an artistic life built on porous boundaries rather than a single, sealed-off discipline.