Creativity Quote by Steve Forbert

A working musician’s most radical move is sometimes refusing the job everyone keeps offering: replacement. “I’m not trying to be the new anybody” pushes back against a culture that loves its artists as upgrades, reboots, or “the next” whatever the market already understands. Forbert’s line lands because it’s both modest and defiant. Modest, because it sidesteps the ego-trip of claiming a throne; defiant, because it rejects the entire monarchy.

In music, especially in the post-60s singer-songwriter ecosystem Forbert came up in, comparison is the default language of promotion. Labels and critics sell you by stapling you to a familiar silhouette: Dylan-esque, Springsteen-adjacent, a new voice from the same factory. Forbert’s career has lived inside that gravitational pull, praised in ways that can flatten an artist into a useful reference point. The quote reads like an artist swatting away a press-kit metaphor before it hardens into destiny.

The subtext is about authorship and survival. Being “the new” someone else is a shortcut to attention, but it’s also a trap: you inherit expectations, feuds you didn’t start, and a narrative that ends when novelty fades. Forbert’s phrasing is pointedly plain, almost conversational, which matters. It sounds like a guy on the road telling you, without theatrics, that he’d rather be durable than trendy.

It’s also an argument for originality as stance, not costume. Not trying to be “the new” anybody doesn’t promise genius; it promises integrity, the quieter kind that keeps making songs when the comparisons move on.