Science & Tech Quote by Jerry Harrison

Harrison is selling a quiet revolution: the studio as a canvas, not a courtroom. Coming from a musician who helped drag rock into art-school territory with Talking Heads, the line frames technology less as a cold upgrade and more as a change in authorship. It is not just that synths and samplers bring "new sounds"; it is that recording itself becomes a medium with its own logic. You do not simply capture a performance, you iterate on it.

The key word is "painterly". Painting implies layers, revisions, an artist stepping back, then returning to alter a detail the audience will never see as "correction" because the finished work is the point. Harrison is pointing at how multitracking, non-destructive editing, automation, and digital recall turned the studio into a place where time is malleable. "Paint over what you've done" is also a gentle rebuke to the romance of the one-take masterpiece. He is normalizing the idea that craft can be incremental without being dishonest.

The subtext is a tension musicians still argue about: is refinement a path to deeper expression, or a slippery slope to sterilized perfection? Harrison lands on the generous side. "Refine an existing performance" suggests fidelity to a core human take, then sculpting around it, rather than replacing the human altogether. In an era where pitch correction and grid-locked drums can erase personality, he is advocating for technology as an enhancer of intention - not a substitute for it.