Creativity Quote by Dan Hicks

Hicks is swatting away a debate that critics love and musicians quietly resent: the fight over eras as if they were moral positions. By insisting its "not about retro or modern", he refuses the easy branding that turns sound into costume. "Retro" and "modern" are marketing bins; they flatter listeners into thinking theyre making a cultural choice when theyre often just choosing a vibe.

The pivot to "this note or that note" shrinks the whole argument down to the smallest unit of craft. Its a sly move. Notes are concrete, testable, unromantic. You can argue about them with your ears, not your identity. Hicks is claiming that taste should be adjudicated where music actually happens: in the micro-decisions of melody, timing, phrasing, and harmonic tension. The subtext is anti-snob and anti-hype at once: stop outsourcing judgment to trend logic, stop pretending innovation is a virtue by itself, stop treating tradition as a museum.

In context, Hicks made a career out of cheerful genre trespassing, folding Western swing, jazz, folk, and pop into something that sounded both old-world and freshly amused. That blend invites exactly the kind of labeling he rejects. The line also reads like a defense of play: if a note lands, it lands, regardless of whether it resembles 1937 or 2027. The real modernity, Hicks suggests, is having the nerve to choose what sounds better even when it doesnt match the story being sold.