Time & Perspective Quote by Edie Brickell

Progress, in Edie Brickell's telling, isn’t a victory lap; it’s a daily practice that refuses the sentimental trap of nostalgia. “Better today than I was yesterday” lands like a musician’s version of rehearsal discipline: you show up, you listen harder, you adjust. It’s modest on the surface, but it carries a quiet defiance against the rock-star mythology that freezes artists in their most photogenic era.

The line about not believing in “glory days” does cultural work. It swats away the industry’s favorite narrative arc: the breakout album, the peak, the slow decline, the reunion tour. Brickell’s subtext is that nostalgia can be a kind of creative tax, forcing you to perform a past self for an audience that wants time travel more than truth. By rejecting “anything like that,” she’s also rejecting the moral hierarchy that crowns one era as the authentic one and treats everything after as footnotes.

Then she pivots, with a sly wink, to “tomorrow or later this afternoon!” That joke matters: it shrinks the grand, self-help promise of “the best is yet to come” down to a playful, reachable timeframe. Hope isn’t framed as a distant redemption but as something that could arrive after lunch, mid-errand, mid-song. It’s an artist’s optimism without the corniness: forward-looking, but allergic to the kind of triumphal narrative that turns living into a highlight reel.