Life & Wisdom Quote by Steve Hackett

Nostalgia here isn’t a warm bath; it’s a filing system. Hackett’s joke lands because it’s self-incriminating and familiar: he can timestamp the 70s down to the album, but the “later efforts” blur into a fog. That asymmetry isn’t just about aging memory. It’s a sly admission that certain eras get canonized so aggressively - by fans, critics, even the artist himself - that they become easier to recall than the work that followed.

The line “it’s funny” does double duty. On the surface, it’s the conversational shrug of someone noticing a quirky mental habit. Underneath, it’s a small, sharp critique of how rock history gets flattened into a greatest-hits decade. The 70s function like a shared mythology with clear chapters and sacred dates; later periods, even when artistically rich, don’t receive the same collective bookkeeping. Memory follows attention, and attention follows the story we’ve decided to tell.

There’s also a quiet edge to “later efforts.” It’s a phrase that sounds polite but carries the faint stigma of the post-peak, the era where the narrative says you’re no longer “making history” so much as continuing to work. Hackett’s rhetorical tag - “isn’t it?” - recruits the listener as co-conspirator, turning private forgetfulness into a comment on public taste. The humor is the sugar; the subtext is about legacy: once an artist is frozen in their golden age, even they can struggle to locate the rest of their life’s work on the timeline.