Art & Creativity Quote by Rick Derringer

There is a defensive humility baked into Rick Derringer's phrasing, the kind musicians learn after years of being misread. "I know some people will be surprised to hear it" tips his hand: he expects an audience that associates blues and rock with indulgence, trouble, maybe even moral panic. The line anticipates the eye-roll that says loud guitars are just attitude and appetite. Derringer preemptively disarms that judgment, not by apologizing for the noise, but by reframing its purpose.

The slippery "whatever you want to call it" is a small act of resistance. Genre labels are marketing tools and cultural cages; he shrugs them off as other people's business. What matters is the current running through the music, and he borrows an almost spiritual metaphor to describe it: "channeled". That word suggests the artist as conduit rather than ego, someone guiding a force that already exists - pain, rage, desire - into something usable.

"Positive direction" could sound like self-help fluff, but in the mouth of a working rock musician it reads more like a claim for redemption without respectability politics. He's not saying the music becomes polite; he's saying it becomes functional. The subtext is experience: crowds sweating out their week, lonely listeners finding a pulse to match their own, a solo that turns anxiety into motion. Derringer is quietly insisting that intensity isn't the enemy of healing; it's often the vehicle.