Creativity Quote by John Sebastian

John Sebastian is doing a neat piece of self-mythmaking here, but it’s the modest, slightly incredulous kind that musicians use when they don’t want to sound like a sales pitch. “Wildly out of style” is both a shrug and a flex: a way to acknowledge the brutal churn of pop fashion while implying he’d already survived it. The phrase frames him as an artist misaligned with the era’s trends, which makes the next beat - a TV theme “suddenly” barging into the Top Ten - read like an accident of culture rather than a calculated comeback.

The verb choice matters. The song “pushed its way” onto the charts as if it had agency, like it elbowed past gatekeepers. That’s a quiet dig at the machinery of hit-making, where success is often explained through promotion budgets and radio deals. Sebastian insists the opposite: “certainly not the record company.” It’s defensiveness with a purpose. He’s protecting authenticity as a brand, yes, but he’s also pointing to a real shift in how hits can happen when mass media reroutes attention.

The context is the peculiar power of television to launder a melody into ubiquity. A theme song isn’t supposed to be “cool,” which is exactly why it can cut through cynicism; it reaches people in their living rooms, repeatedly, without asking permission from critics or tastemakers. Sebastian’s subtext: sometimes the culture chooses for itself, and the industry has to pretend it meant to all along.