Time & Perspective Quote by Stanley Clarke

There is a sly flex buried in Clarke's understatement: he's been recording constantly, just not in the way fans of a marquee jazz-funk bassist might measure "output". The first clause sounds like a humble check-in, but it's also a quiet recalibration of status. Recording, for him, hasn't slowed; the spotlight has simply moved. By framing the last decade as "directed toward film composing and soundtracks", Clarke is signaling a deliberate pivot from the album-as-statement to music-as-infrastructure: cues, themes, textures that serve story and image.

The subtext is about legitimacy and craft. Film work is often treated as a parallel career, a side hustle for musicians who can't (or won't) keep chasing the touring/label treadmill. Clarke flips that assumption. He implies the grind is realer, the volume higher, the discipline sharper. "Directed toward" suggests authorship and intention, not compromise. It also hints at the invisibility tax of soundtrack labor: you're prolific, but your name isn't always what audiences remember when the scene lands.

Then he lands on "Just the same, it's been great" - a compact rebuttal to any imagined disappointment. No angst, no apology, just a satisfaction that reads earned. In the context of Clarke's generation, this is also a story about adaptation: musicians who came up building careers on records and live dates now finding a second creative peak inside Hollywood's machinery. It's not retreat. It's a different kind of stage.