Life & Mortality Quote by Robert Wyatt

Wyatt is talking about creative hunger in the most unglamorous terms possible: not conquest, not legacy, just the nagging sense that you never quite grabbed the thing you’ve been reaching for. “It” stays deliberately vague, because for musicians it’s always vague - the perfect take, the song that finally tells the truth, the feeling that your hands and your head lined up for once. The power of the line is that it frames ambition as unfinished business rather than aspiration. You don’t chase “it” to win; you chase it so you can stop being haunted.

The second sentence turns mortality into a studio constraint. “Before you die” isn’t melodrama; it’s a deadline that arrives whether you’re ready or not, and it sharpens the impulse to attempt one clean, honest pass. Wyatt’s phrasing - “try and get it right once” - is humbly brutal. Once. Not an oeuvre, not a reinvention tour. One moment of alignment would be enough.

Then comes the adult reality: diminishing energy. Age, illness, burnout, the slow attrition of stamina - and in Wyatt’s case, a life shaped by physical limitation after his 1973 accident. The subtext is that inspiration doesn’t retire on schedule, even as the body does. So you bargain: maybe the experience accrued over years can compensate for less fuel. It’s a musician’s late-career math, equal parts resignation and defiance, insisting that wisdom might still beat wattage.