Creativity Quote by Robin Trower

There is a particular kind of self-preservation baked into Robin Trower’s advice: the idea that fan mail is less a mirror than a funhouse. Praise arrives inflated, intimate, and often unearned in proportion to the actual relationship. To read it closely is to risk confusing someone else’s projected version of you with the person who still has to pick up a guitar and do the work tomorrow.

The intent isn’t contempt for fans so much as boundary-setting. In rock culture, adoration can act like a drug with a great marketing department: it feels validating, it’s socially reinforced, and it quietly rewires your sense of normal. Trower’s “sensible” is doing heavy lifting here, casting restraint as a practical choice rather than a moral pose. He’s not preaching purity; he’s acknowledging a hazard of the job.

The subtext is that fan mail isn’t neutral feedback. It’s a one-way emotional transaction shaped by parasocial closeness, nostalgia, and the listener’s need for meaning. Taking it “too seriously” can distort your compass in two directions: you start chasing approval, or you start believing your own legend. Either way, the art gets hemmed in by audience management.

Context matters: Trower comes out of a generation of guitar heroes mythologized by distance, when mystique was part of the apparatus. Not reading fan mail keeps the distance intact, protecting a space where the musician isn’t required to be a character in someone else’s story. It’s a quietly modern lesson about attention: not all of it is good for you, even when it’s love.