Creativity Quote by Edie Brickell

Admiration is doing a lot of work here, but it’s not the fan-gush kind. It’s the envy artists are allowed to admit: the kind that doesn’t shrink you, it sharpens you. When Edie Brickell says Rufus Wainwright “makes me wanna be even more musical,” she’s naming a particular creative provocation. Not “better,” not “more successful,” not “more famous” - more musical. That’s an insider’s compliment, aimed at craft rather than career.

Brickell’s phrasing is deliberately unglamorous, almost schoolyard in its plainness (“a whole lot,” “wanna”), and that’s part of the point. It strips away the critical apparatus and lands on the gut-level truth of influence: when someone’s writing is that harmonically rich, that fearless about melodrama, it can make your own work feel like it needs to grow up. Wainwright’s reputation - ornate arrangements, theatrical vocal phrasing, a willingness to push pop into operatic territory - becomes, in her sentence, less a style than a standard.

There’s subtext, too, in choosing “musical” as the axis of aspiration. Brickell came up in an era and lane where “songwriter authenticity” often meant restraint: clean grooves, conversational wit, a kind of studied looseness. Wainwright represents the opposite permission slip: maximalism, emotional chiaroscuro, the audacity to be pretty. Her intent is a quiet reorientation of values - a reminder that sophistication can be sincere, and that the best peers don’t intimidate you into silence; they dare you to add more notes.