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Creativity Quote by Sean Lennon

"I have a piano and a guitar, and I tend to switch back and forth between those two instruments to help me get inspired"

About this Quote

Creativity, for Sean Lennon, isn’t a lightning strike so much as a practical routine: change the tool, change the mind. The piano and guitar aren’t just instruments here; they’re two different cognitive environments. Piano is architecture - harmony laid out in clean, visible geometry. Guitar is intimacy and muscle memory - rhythm under the fingers, chords that bend, buzz, and misbehave. Switching between them is a way to dodge the dead-end tunnel of habit, the moment when your hands start writing the song instead of your ear.

There’s an unflashy honesty in the line, and that’s part of why it lands. Lennon isn’t mythologizing inspiration as suffering or genius; he’s describing it like a musician’s version of cross-training. That matters culturally because we’re still addicted to the romantic story of the songwriter alone in a room, possessed. He’s offering a quieter counter-narrative: inspiration is engineered, coaxed, scheduled, nudged by small physical changes.

The subtext also brushes against lineage. As the child of two artists whose work is endlessly overinterpreted, Lennon’s statement gently resists the idea that songs arrive via inherited mystique. It’s almost anti-nepotism rhetoric: the craft is in the practice, the experimenting, the willingness to start over in a new key - literally and figuratively.

In an era of infinite digital options, he’s also pointing back to tactile limits. Two instruments, two moods, one method: keep moving so the song can catch up.

Quote Details

TopicMusic
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Lennon, Sean. (2026, January 15). I have a piano and a guitar, and I tend to switch back and forth between those two instruments to help me get inspired. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-a-piano-and-a-guitar-and-i-tend-to-switch-162523/

Chicago Style
Lennon, Sean. "I have a piano and a guitar, and I tend to switch back and forth between those two instruments to help me get inspired." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-a-piano-and-a-guitar-and-i-tend-to-switch-162523/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I have a piano and a guitar, and I tend to switch back and forth between those two instruments to help me get inspired." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-a-piano-and-a-guitar-and-i-tend-to-switch-162523/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Sean Lennon (born October 9, 1975) is a Musician from USA.

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