Art & Creativity Quote by Greg Lake

There is both curiosity and a quiet confession in Greg Lake's phrasing: "involve myself" reads less like a casual detour and more like a deliberate act of apprenticeship. For a musician associated with the grand architecture of British prog rock, this is an admission that virtuosity and ambition can still leave you craving a different kind of truth - the kind blues and gospel are culturally coded to deliver: raw feeling, communal voice, unvarnished stakes.

The intent is plain enough: expand range, avoid creative stagnation. The subtext is trickier, and more revealing. Lake names "black music" first, then specifies blues and gospel, signaling he understands these forms as foundational, not ornamental. But the language also betrays the era's typical distance: "some black music" can sound like a genre aisle, a place you visit, rather than a living tradition with histories of exploitation and erasure. That tension - respect shaded by outsider framing - is the cultural weather of a lot of rock in the 60s and 70s, when white British artists drew heavily from Black American forms while often treating them as a palette to broaden their own careers.

Context matters: prog prized complexity, length, and spectacle; blues and gospel prize feel, repetition, and surrender. Lake's desire to "widen my musical base" hints at a recalibration of values, a move from impressing the listener to reaching them. It's not just expansion; it's a search for legitimacy that technique alone can't grant.