Creativity Quote by Brian May

It is a bruised little confession that doubles as a love letter to a rival genius. Brian May isn’t just admitting insecurity; he’s sketching the moment a musician’s internal ranking system gets violently recalibrated. The first clause - "I really thought I was pretty good" - carries the quiet swagger of a player who’s earned his chops. Then Hendrix enters like a weather event, and the second clause lands with that deadpan sting: "Yeah, not so good". The phrasing matters. May doesn’t say "Hendrix was better". He describes a self-perception collapsing in real time, as if his own talent shrank under a new, harsher light.

The subtext is less about humiliation than about scale. Hendrix didn’t simply play faster or cleaner; he expanded what electric guitar could be: sound as physical force, feedback as vocabulary, technique as spectacle and risk. For a meticulous architect like May - the guy who built his own guitar and stacked harmonies into cathedrals - Hendrix represented a different kind of authority: raw, improvisational, bordering on anarchic. That clash makes May’s reaction believable and culturally telling.

Context helps: late 60s London was a pressure cooker of virtuosity, ego, and reinvention. Hendrix arrived as an outsider and instantly rewrote the room’s rules. May’s humility, offered decades later, also signals rock’s healthiest tradition: lineage. Great players don’t just compete; they get haunted, corrected, and ultimately propelled by the artists who show them the ceiling was never the ceiling.