"I used to love Bach"
About this Quote
A small sentence with a big shadow: "I used to love Bach" isn’t really about Bach. It’s about the moment you realize your taste has a timeline, and that the things that once felt like home can start to feel like homework.
Coming from a working musician, the line reads less like a snide dismissal of classical music and more like an admission of drift. Bach is shorthand for discipline, structure, the kind of beauty that’s been canonized into obligation. To say you “used to love” him frames love as something that can be worn down by repetition, by training, by turning pleasure into professional language. Musicians often discover the cruel irony that the deeper you study a thing, the harder it is to encounter it innocently. Bach becomes scales, analysis, expectations, a yardstick other people use to measure you.
The phrase also carries a generational subtext. For artists coming up in rock and metal-adjacent worlds, reverence for classical composers can be both genuine and performative: proof you’re “serious,” that your aggression has pedigree. Dropping that reverence in the past tense is a quiet rebellion against respectability. It suggests a shift from auditioning for approval to chasing whatever actually moves you now.
Most of all, it’s blunt in a way musicians rarely get to be. No manifesto, no explanation, just a clean break. The emotional truth lands because it’s unadorned: sometimes your heroes don’t fall; you simply outgrow the version of yourself who needed them.
Coming from a working musician, the line reads less like a snide dismissal of classical music and more like an admission of drift. Bach is shorthand for discipline, structure, the kind of beauty that’s been canonized into obligation. To say you “used to love” him frames love as something that can be worn down by repetition, by training, by turning pleasure into professional language. Musicians often discover the cruel irony that the deeper you study a thing, the harder it is to encounter it innocently. Bach becomes scales, analysis, expectations, a yardstick other people use to measure you.
The phrase also carries a generational subtext. For artists coming up in rock and metal-adjacent worlds, reverence for classical composers can be both genuine and performative: proof you’re “serious,” that your aggression has pedigree. Dropping that reverence in the past tense is a quiet rebellion against respectability. It suggests a shift from auditioning for approval to chasing whatever actually moves you now.
Most of all, it’s blunt in a way musicians rarely get to be. No manifesto, no explanation, just a clean break. The emotional truth lands because it’s unadorned: sometimes your heroes don’t fall; you simply outgrow the version of yourself who needed them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|
More Quotes by Josh
Add to List
