Time & Perspective Quote by Leo Kottke

The grind of the record-business clock is all over Kottke's sentence: "required by Capital" lands like a contract clause, not a creative invitation. He frames the label as Capital (spelled like the institution, not the people), a small rhetorical jab that turns an employer into an economic force. The six-month mandate versus his nine-month reality isn't just scheduling; it's the mismatch between a touring musician's lived tempo and an industry's production cadence, the assembly-line logic that treats albums like inventory.

The anxiety is telling: "it would spook me every time". Not frustration, not anger - fear. Kottke is describing the specific dread of being asked to manufacture readiness on command. Touring, the thing audiences romanticize as freedom, becomes the reason he's always behind, because the road consumes the very time and quiet that songwriting needs. The subtext is that success creates its own scarcity: the more you're in demand, the less you're able to deliver the thing you're being demanded for.

Then there's the moral line he draws around "covers". In label terms, covers can be a safety valve: fast, familiar, marketable. For Kottke, they're a creative compromise, a signal that he's padding a deadline rather than saying something new. He isn't posturing as a purist; he's confessing to a practical panic where integrity becomes another ticking clock. The quote captures a particular era's industry pressure, but it still reads like today's content treadmill: the fear of running out of self before the release schedule runs out of patience.