Time & Perspective Quote by Daniel Johns

There is something bracingly anti-mythic about a musician admitting he made a beloved record while hating the very medium. Daniel Johns isn’t selling the romantic fantasy of inspiration; he’s puncturing it. The ellipses do work here: they mimic someone circling a memory they still can’t enter cleanly, a confession broken by reluctance and a kind of self-protection. “I hated music” isn’t just burnout. It’s a rejection of the machinery around music: expectation, touring, label pressure, the public’s ownership of your voice once it becomes a product.

Placed against Neon Ballroom’s cultural afterimage - an album often read as Silverchair’s leap into darker, more adult terrain - the line rewrites the narrative. The album’s intensity starts to look less like a stylistic choice and more like a survival tactic. When Johns says he hated “really everything about it,” he’s widening the target from sound to system, from art to industry, from self-expression to the version of himself that fame required him to perform.

The intent is clarifying, almost corrective: don’t confuse accomplishment with enjoyment. The subtext is that discipline and distress can coexist, and that creative output can be a symptom as much as a triumph. In an era that still rewards artists for turning pain into content, Johns’ candor reads as both indictment and warning: sometimes the masterpiece isn’t the proof you were okay; it’s the evidence you weren’t.