Creativity Quote by Trevor Dunn

There’s a sly honesty in Dunn’s phrasing: he won’t pretend he’s staging a museum-grade Surrealist manifesto, but he also refuses the myth that music is pure instinct, untouched by ideas. “More personal” signals autobiography, temperament, private obsessions - the stuff that can’t be diagrammed into an art-historical lineage. Then comes the careful pivot: “I certainly tried to adapt certain concepts of Surrealism.” Not “embraced Surrealism,” not “was influenced by,” but adapt, concepts, certain. It’s the language of a working musician protecting his interior life while admitting a toolkit.

That distinction matters because Surrealism, culturally, is often flattened into aesthetic garnish: dream imagery, weird juxtapositions, quirky darkness. Dunn’s sentence suggests something more functional. “Concepts” hints at method rather than look: dislocation, irrational logic, collage thinking, the deliberate sabotage of linear narrative. In music, that can mean structure that behaves like a dream - motifs that recur out of nowhere, tonal shifts that feel like scene cuts, humor that arrives with a knife.

The subtext is also defensive in a productive way. Artists get trapped by genre tags and art-school expectations; Dunn’s hedging is a refusal to be pinned down as “the Surrealist guy.” He’s claiming agency: Surrealism isn’t a brand identity, it’s a set of procedures he can bend to serve the personal. That’s a very contemporary move - less about pledging allegiance to a movement, more about remixing its strategies to make something that still feels like a diary, not a thesis.