Creativity Quote by Joshua Homme

“I like to keep my feet on the sidewalk” is Joshua Homme doing what he often does best: turning a plainspoken image into a quiet manifesto. On the surface it’s a throwaway line about staying grounded, but the phrasing matters. The sidewalk is public, unglamorous, and shared. It’s the opposite of the velvet-rope fantasy that clings to rock stardom: limos, backstage corridors, the sealed-off life where reality gets edited out. Homme’s choosing the pedestrian lane on purpose, not because he can’t access the “street” or the “sky,” but because he’s suspicious of the myth that elevation equals freedom.

There’s subtext here about discipline, too. “Keep” suggests maintenance, a practiced refusal to drift into the extremes his scene has historically romanticized: excess as authenticity, chaos as personality. Coming from a musician whose work thrives on swagger and abrasion, the line reads like a private rule scribbled in the margins of a loud life. It’s not moralizing; it’s self-management.

Contextually, Homme’s career sits at an intersection of desert-rock mystique and very human messiness: cult credibility, big-stage success, public scrutiny, and the long hangover of rock’s self-destructive script. The sidewalk becomes a way to reclaim agency. Not “I never fall,” but “I’m trying to stay where consequences are visible.” It’s a small sentence that resists the grand pose, which is exactly why it lands.