Creativity Quote by Daniel Johns

There is a particular kind of emotional purgatory that comes with being a working musician: your past doesn’t just live in memory, it has a nightly set time. Daniel Johns nails that trap in one clean sentence. “Hard to get over” is the language of breakups and recovery, but he’s not talking about a single relationship so much as a whole era - a version of yourself you might have outgrown, or that might have outgrown you.

The line’s quiet accusation is aimed at the machinery of performance. “Constantly revisiting it every night” frames the stage less as liberation than as obligation: the greatest hits become a looping re-enactment, the crowd’s nostalgia turning into a kind of contract. Fans hear an anthem; the artist hears a timestamp. That mismatch is where the tension sits, and Johns writes it without melodrama, letting repetition do the work. “Every night” isn’t poetic emphasis, it’s scheduling.

The specific intent reads like a defense of forward motion - a way to explain why an artist might resist playing the old songs, why reinvention can feel less like vanity and more like survival. Subtextually, it’s also about identity getting fossilized in public: your mistakes, your look, your teenage voice, your old pain, all preserved and requested on demand.

In the pop ecosystem, we talk about “eras” as branding. Johns flips the term back into something human: an era as something you’re trying to leave, and a career that won’t let you.