Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Thompson

Thompson is making a small rebellion against the way pop culture trains us to listen with our eyes. The line sounds modest, but it’s also a defensive maneuver from an artist who’s spent decades in a business that increasingly sells personality as the product and music as the packaging. “Without prejudice” isn’t just about avoiding snobbery; it’s about dodging the instant sorting mechanisms of genre, age, politics, accent, scene, even the mythology of “legend.” He’s asking for the rarest kind of attention: let the song land before the narrative does.

The subtext is a veteran’s skepticism about celebrity. Thompson came up in a British folk-rock tradition where craft and tradition mattered, then watched the industry pivot toward branding and identity as shortcuts for meaning. His insistence that “who I am isn’t that important” reads like humility, but it’s also a bid for artistic sovereignty: don’t reduce the work to a personality quiz. It’s the opposite of the confessional economy where fans are sold access to an inner life as proof of authenticity.

The phrasing “if they like the songs to me” is tellingly off-kilter, like spoken language catching up to a thought. He isn’t promising transcendence; he’s negotiating a fair hearing. In an era of parasocial fandom, Thompson is arguing for an older contract: the music should earn you first, and biography can come later as a bonus, not a prerequisite.