Time & Perspective Quote by Barry Mann

Creativity, in Barry Mann's telling, isn't a faucet you turn on with enough professionalism; it's weather. That plainspoken admission cuts against the myth the music industry loves to sell: that great songs are a steady product line if you just keep the sessions booked and the coffee hot. Mann looks back at the catalog the way fans do, but with a writer's ruthless accounting. The surprise isn't that there are highs and lows. It's that even for someone with his track record, the gaps are real, measurable, and a little mysterious.

The phrase "pockets of time" is doing a lot of work. It frames inspiration as clustered and scarce, something you discover in retrospect rather than command in the moment. Then he pivots - "all of a sudden" - capturing how quickly the streak breaks, as if the skill didn't leave but the spark did. The bluntness of "there weren't great songs" is almost bracing; no euphemisms about "experiments" or "finding our sound". He's separating competence from greatness, and he's admitting that a career can be full of solid work without necessarily producing the thing you want to be remembered for.

Context matters here: Mann came up in the Brill Building era, an environment built on output, deadlines, and collaboration - essentially a song factory with glamour. His comment quietly punctures the factory fantasy. Even inside a system designed for consistency, the best stuff arrives in bursts, and the rest of the time you're still showing up, writing anyway, waiting for the next pocket to open.