Time & Perspective Quote by Tommy Shaw

Tommy Shaw frames creativity less as lightning-bolt genius and more as a kind of everyday receptivity: the trick is not “having ideas” but staying open enough to notice them. For a working musician from a classic-rock lineage, that’s a quietly democratizing claim. He’s not mythologizing the artist as a rare conduit; he’s nudging the listener - and the younger songwriter - toward a practical ethic: attention is the real instrument.

The phrase “music in your head” does a lot of cultural work. It borrows the language of daydreaming and earworms, those half-accidental loops that show up while you’re driving or doing dishes. Shaw’s subtext is that originality often arrives in that same casual register, before it becomes “a song” with chords and a chorus. The intent is permission-giving: if you’ve ever had a melody drift through your mind, you’re already standing at the door of songwriting. What separates pros from amateurs isn’t mystical inspiration; it’s the willingness to treat those fleeting fragments as worth capturing.

There’s also a gentle pushback here against perfectionism and gatekeeping. By saying “most people,” Shaw deflates the anxiety that creativity belongs only to the trained or the anointed. In the context of rock’s long romance with tortured authenticity, this is almost anti-romantic: craft begins with listening, not suffering. Being “open” becomes a discipline, a way of living with fewer filters, and it’s an argument that the modern noise problem isn’t a lack of ideas - it’s a lack of attention.