"I think that what I'm interested with is the creative side of music-making, rather than all the travelling"
About this Quote
There’s a quiet rebellion in this line, the kind that only makes sense once you’ve seen how the music industry sells the myth of motion. For decades, rock culture treated touring as proof of authenticity: the grind, the road stories, the band-as-family fantasy. Michael Giles swerves away from that script. He’s not disavowing music; he’s disavowing the lifestyle that gets packaged with it.
The specific intent is almost practical: a preference for making over moving. But the subtext is sharper. “Creative side” isn’t just studio time; it’s control. It’s the part of a musician’s life where decisions are aesthetic rather than logistical, where the work is shaped by curiosity instead of schedules, promoters, and exhaustion. “Travelling” becomes shorthand for the non-music that colonizes musicianship: waiting in airports, playing the same set to meet the economics of ticket sales, performing consistency when your instincts are pulling toward experimentation.
Context matters because Giles comes from an era when bands could be defined by albums as much as by tours, when the studio was turning into an instrument and not just a place to document songs. His phrasing also hints at temperament: a player drawn to craft, texture, and invention rather than the extroverted theater of the road. In a culture that equates visibility with value, the line is a small refusal - an insistence that the real center of music-making is not the miles logged, but the ideas pursued.
The specific intent is almost practical: a preference for making over moving. But the subtext is sharper. “Creative side” isn’t just studio time; it’s control. It’s the part of a musician’s life where decisions are aesthetic rather than logistical, where the work is shaped by curiosity instead of schedules, promoters, and exhaustion. “Travelling” becomes shorthand for the non-music that colonizes musicianship: waiting in airports, playing the same set to meet the economics of ticket sales, performing consistency when your instincts are pulling toward experimentation.
Context matters because Giles comes from an era when bands could be defined by albums as much as by tours, when the studio was turning into an instrument and not just a place to document songs. His phrasing also hints at temperament: a player drawn to craft, texture, and invention rather than the extroverted theater of the road. In a culture that equates visibility with value, the line is a small refusal - an insistence that the real center of music-making is not the miles logged, but the ideas pursued.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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