Creativity Quote by Joanna Newsom

Newsom is doing the delicate PR judo every young band has to learn: acknowledge the obvious without getting trapped in it. She grants the premise - yes, shared influences happen, especially in scenes where everyone grew up on the same canonical records. That first sentence is a strategic concession, a way of sounding fair-minded while keeping the conversation from turning into a courtroom cross-examination of originality.

Then she flips the frame with a blunt, almost endearingly unpolished distinction between "valid" and "invalid". It's not academic; it's musician-to-interviewer language, built to shut down a lazy narrative. The subtext is defensive but not hostile: stop reducing us to a derivation. She rejects the most culturally damning accusation in indie rock discourse: that you're a cover band for the zeitgeist. "We listen to the Strokes and try to sounds like them" (the grammatical stumble is telling) reads like someone speaking quickly, trying to get ahead of a comparison that's already calcifying into a headline.

What's smart is the final move: praise as insulation. "I think that they are a good band" isn't a pivot to fandom so much as a refusal to turn differentiation into beef. In the early-2000s ecosystem, where media loved pitting acts against each other and the Strokes were a lightning rod for "savior of rock" hype, she threads the needle: we share lineage, we have our own voice, and I'm not going to perform resentment for your story.