Creativity Quote by Ronnie Montrose

There is a disarming modesty baked into Montrose's sentence, the kind musicians use when they know a record worked but still want to honor the mess and luck behind it. "Following my muse" is classic rock-world shorthand: inspiration framed as something external you chase, not a brand strategy you execute. It keeps ego at bay while quietly claiming artistic legitimacy. He is saying the decisions were intuitive, maybe even impulsive, and that the results weren’t engineered by committee.

The subtext sits in the next clause: "fortunate in having good people around me". Montrose was a guitarist and bandleader in scenes where credits can get political and mythology tends to elevate the lone genius. He swerves away from that story. The line credits the invisible infrastructure that makes a "muse" usable: bandmates who can translate a riff into a song, engineers who can capture it, producers who know when not to interfere. It also reads as a gentle corrective to the romantic idea that great records are born purely from private vision.

Then he lands on the most telling hedge: "pretty good... in my opinion". Not false humility so much as musician realism. Records live in public, but creators live with the outtakes, the compromises, the version they heard in their head. Montrose positions the album as a snapshot of a moment when inspiration met competent collaboration and, crucially, didn’t get ruined by the process. That’s the quiet triumph he’s naming: not perfection, but alignment.