Creativity Quote by Martin Gore

A self-portrait in near-tautology, Martin Gore’s line is quietly revealing: he’s not trying to sound clever about taste, he’s staking out a working principle. The redundancy (“emotional” twice, “strike a chord… emotionally”) reads less like laziness than insistence. In a pop culture ecosystem trained to defend preferences with genre credentials, irony, or “objective” craft talk, Gore doubles down on the least defensible metric: feeling. That’s a power move for a songwriter whose career has been built on giving synth-driven music a bruised human pulse.

The intent is practical. Gore is describing a filter for what he listens to and, by extension, what he writes: songs aren’t puzzles to admire; they’re devices meant to change your internal weather. The subtext is an argument about authenticity that Depeche Mode has long complicated. Their sound can be cold, mechanized, even fetishistically sleek, yet the best of it lands because the emotions are overheated: longing, guilt, devotion, shame. “Striking a chord” nods to the literal mechanics of songwriting, but it also frames emotional response as resonance, not revelation. You don’t get enlightened; you vibrate.

Context matters: Gore emerged when electronic music was often dismissed as soulless and when pop emotion was frequently coded as suspect or sentimental. His statement refuses that split. He’s pointing to the secret bargain in much of modern music: the more synthetic the surface, the more urgent the need for a human wound underneath.