Creativity Quote by Trevor Rabin

In film and TV, the director is the sun and everyone else is orbiting. Trevor Rabin’s line lands because it’s both disarmingly polite and quietly strategic: “important” signals career survival, while “positive” is the tell. He’s not talking about friendship; he’s talking about trust, access, and the power to shape a scene’s emotional temperature before the edit locks it in.

As a musician who’s moved between bands and scoring, Rabin knows that the soundtrack isn’t decoration. It’s narrative control. A director who believes in you will invite experimentation, give you room to fail, and fight for your cues when producers want something “safer” (read: temp-track imitation). A director who doesn’t will treat you like a vendor, pulling you in late, demanding instant miracles, then replacing your work with the placeholder everyone got attached to. “Relationship” here is shorthand for a whole workflow: spotting sessions, feedback loops, the ability to ask what the story is really about instead of just matching beats.

The subtext is also about ego management in a hierarchy built on taste. Film music is unusually vulnerable to second-guessing because everyone has ears and opinions. A “positive” relationship becomes a shield against that noise, a shared language that turns notes from vague (“make it more emotional”) into actionable storytelling. Rabin’s intent reads like advice, but it doubles as a map of the industry: your best instrument isn’t your guitar or your synth rig, it’s alignment with the person calling the shots.