"It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page"
About this Quote
Baez makes authorship sound less like mastery than like possession: the best songs, she insists, arrive when she stops trying to own them. The image is delightfully bodily and a little uncanny - words "crawled down my sleeve" like some tame creature finding daylight. It dodges the macho myth of the lone genius hammering out greatness and replaces it with a folk-era ethic: the song is older than you are, and you're lucky if it chooses you.
The intent reads as humility, but it's also a quiet claim to authenticity. If the words come unbidden, they aren't manufactured for applause, career strategy, or political branding; they're presented as a kind of truth you catch rather than invent. That matters for Baez, whose public identity has always been braided with moral witness. In the 1960s folk revival, "writing" wasn't just craft, it was credibility. By framing her best work as involuntary, she sidesteps competitive auteur politics (especially in a scene crowded with towering songwriters) while still asserting that her songs carry real voltage.
There's subtext, too, about the cost of being a vessel. If the good songs happen when she has "nothing much to do with" them, then control is almost the enemy - and so is ego. The sleeve image suggests intimacy, even inevitability: the material is already on her body, waiting. It's a musician describing inspiration as a physical event, which is another way of saying the work is personal without being performative.
The intent reads as humility, but it's also a quiet claim to authenticity. If the words come unbidden, they aren't manufactured for applause, career strategy, or political branding; they're presented as a kind of truth you catch rather than invent. That matters for Baez, whose public identity has always been braided with moral witness. In the 1960s folk revival, "writing" wasn't just craft, it was credibility. By framing her best work as involuntary, she sidesteps competitive auteur politics (especially in a scene crowded with towering songwriters) while still asserting that her songs carry real voltage.
There's subtext, too, about the cost of being a vessel. If the good songs happen when she has "nothing much to do with" them, then control is almost the enemy - and so is ego. The sleeve image suggests intimacy, even inevitability: the material is already on her body, waiting. It's a musician describing inspiration as a physical event, which is another way of saying the work is personal without being performative.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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