Wealth & Money Quote by Dan Hicks

Restless ambition meets the blunt economics of being uncategorizable. Dan Hicks isn’t spinning a romantic tale of the starving artist here; he’s describing a career lived in the gap between wanting to make records and having an industry willing to bankroll them. The first clause carries the ache of creative itch - “always looking” suggests a musician perpetually hearing the next version of himself. Then comes the self-check: “how much I actually pursued it was another thing.” That’s not false modesty so much as a quiet admission of how discouragement works. It doesn’t just block you; it reshapes your behavior until hesitation starts to look like a personality trait.

His real target is the machinery that turns art into product. Major labels “weren’t that interested” reads like polite understatement for a harsher truth: if you don’t fit radio formats, marketing narratives, or easy genre bins, you become expensive. Hicks’ hybrid sensibility - swing, folk, jazz, country, a little smirk of beatnik cool - is exactly the kind of thing that audiences might love but executives can’t pitch in a single sentence.

The punchline is the double bind: the majors have money but no curiosity; the indies have curiosity but no money. It’s a neat snapshot of a pre-streaming world where recording wasn’t just an artistic decision, it was access to capital. Hicks’ tone stays conversational, but the subtext is structural: talent doesn’t “rise”; it gets financed, categorized, and distributed - or it doesn’t.