Creativity Quote by Andy Summers

Summers is talking about chemistry, but he’s really talking about standards. The phrase “cover a lot of ground” sounds like casual musician shorthand, yet it’s a quiet flex: he’s not interested in a partner who merely keeps time or stays in their lane. He wants range, adaptability, the ability to move fast across styles, textures, and ideas without needing the room to slow down for them. Coming from a guitarist whose legacy is built as much on restraint and atmosphere as on chops, “ground” isn’t just notes-per-second virtuosity; it’s vocabulary.

Then he slips in the key tell: “discuss the language.” Not “talk about music,” but “the language,” as if music is a shared grammar with rules, idioms, and subclauses. It frames collaboration as conversation between fluent speakers, not a lecture or a guessing game. The “reasonable level” is wonderfully polite, and also slightly ruthless. It implies there’s an unreasonable level too: players who can’t name what they’re doing, can’t hear the difference between an idea and a habit, can’t articulate why a part works.

The final clause, “otherwise it gets a bit frustrating,” is British understatement doing damage. Frustrating for whom? For the artist who’s trying to build something precise with someone who can’t meet him in the middle. In the broader context of Summers’ career (high-concept pop, tight arrangements, strong personalities), the quote reads like a survival mechanism: make sure your collaborators have both the athleticism and the literacy, or the art collapses into compromise.