"It was almost two years after I left Capital that I put out the first one on Chrysalis and that was really instructive because it was no better in particular than any other record I'd done"
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There is something quietly bracing in how Leo Kottke refuses the usual comeback narrative. Leaving a major label is supposed to be the heroic pivot: the artist unshackled, the “real” work finally arriving. Kottke undercuts that myth with a shrug disguised as precision. Nearly two years pass, he delivers a first album on Chrysalis, and the verdict is almost comically unsentimental: it wasn’t “better in particular.” Not worse, not revelatory. Just another record.
That flatness is the point. Kottke is describing a hard-earned lesson about craft and infrastructure: changing the logo on the sleeve doesn’t magically change the music. The subtext reads like a musician talking himself out of romantic thinking. Labels can shape budgets, timelines, promotion, even morale, but they don’t automatically upgrade the artistic outcome. What upgrades the outcome is the slow, unglamorous accumulation of work - the same hands on the same instrument, day after day.
The phrase “really instructive” signals a private recalibration. He isn’t bitter; he’s clearer. In an industry that sells reinvention as both product and personality, Kottke’s candor is a kind of resistance. He frames artistic life not as a sequence of breakthroughs but as continuity - records as iterations rather than milestones. It’s a musician’s realism that doubles as cultural critique: the business loves the story of transformation; the work usually looks like repetition with small, hard-won variations.
That flatness is the point. Kottke is describing a hard-earned lesson about craft and infrastructure: changing the logo on the sleeve doesn’t magically change the music. The subtext reads like a musician talking himself out of romantic thinking. Labels can shape budgets, timelines, promotion, even morale, but they don’t automatically upgrade the artistic outcome. What upgrades the outcome is the slow, unglamorous accumulation of work - the same hands on the same instrument, day after day.
The phrase “really instructive” signals a private recalibration. He isn’t bitter; he’s clearer. In an industry that sells reinvention as both product and personality, Kottke’s candor is a kind of resistance. He frames artistic life not as a sequence of breakthroughs but as continuity - records as iterations rather than milestones. It’s a musician’s realism that doubles as cultural critique: the business loves the story of transformation; the work usually looks like repetition with small, hard-won variations.
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| Topic | Music |
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