Creativity Quote by John Sebastian

There is a defensiveness in John Sebastian's phrasing that feels deeply musician-brained: the need to draw a bright line between theft and tradition. "In other words" signals a rewind, like he's heard the accusation before and is tightening the argument for people who weren't listening the first time. Then he slips into insider shorthand - "musicians know" - staking authority with the only jury that really matters to him: the players, the lifers, the ones who can hear intent inside a chord change.

The context is The Lovin' Spoonful's place in a 1960s ecosystem where everything was a conversation: jug band revival, blues borrowings, Tin Pan Alley echoes, British Invasion reinventions. Sebastian isn't denying influence; he's reframing it as craft. "Going back" casts the band's sound as archival work, a deliberate return to older American forms. That matters because the era's pop marketplace rewarded novelty while quietly running on recycled DNA. He wants credit not for inventing from nothing, but for recombining honestly.

The subtext is about authenticity, a word that haunted the decade. Copying implies cynicism and commerce; drawing from roots implies care and lineage. By insisting they "were not copying", Sebastian is also protecting a moral identity: we loved this music, we learned its language, we added ourselves to it. It's a small sentence doing big reputational labor, trying to keep homage from being misread as mimicry - and to remind you that in music, originality often lives in the choices between the notes, not the fact of influence itself.