Creativity Quote by Solomon Burke

There is swagger in Solomon Burke claiming, "I should have my own publishing companies", but it is the tired kind of swagger that comes from doing the math and realizing the industry’s been doing it for you. Coming from a soul singer who helped define a sound yet watched wealth pool elsewhere, the line reads less like a daydream than a belated receipt. Publishing is where the money sleeps: not the applause, not even the record sale, but the ownership of the underlying song rights that keep paying when the spotlight moves on.

Burke’s phrasing matters. Not "a company", but "companies" signals scale and strategy, a recognition that the system isn’t a single bad deal but an architecture. It’s also a quiet indictment of the era’s standard arrangement: labels and managers acting as gatekeepers, artists treated as voice-for-hire, and Black performers especially pressured into contracts that traded long-term control for short-term access. The subtext is a hard-earned lesson: talent is leverage only if you can translate it into ownership.

There’s a cultural moment embedded here, too. By the time Burke could say this out loud, musicians were increasingly public about rights, masters, and royalties; the romance of being "discovered" was giving way to the realism of being capitalized on. The intent isn’t simply entrepreneurial. It’s reparative. He’s naming the missing infrastructure that would have protected his catalog, his family, and his legacy from becoming someone else’s annuity.