Creativity Quote by Jerry Harrison

There is a quiet flex in Jerry Harrison admitting he trusts gut over brain: it signals the point in a musician’s career when craft stops looking like effort and starts behaving like instinct. “Increasingly” matters. He’s not romanticizing intuition as some mystical shortcut; he’s describing a learned reflex, built through repetition, mistakes, and thousands of micro-decisions made in studios where overthinking can kill momentum. In record-making, ideas don’t arrive as essays. They arrive as sounds, textures, tensions in the air. You either chase them quickly or you lose them.

The subtext is a critique of the over-intellectualized version of artistry that fans (and sometimes artists) cling to: the fantasy that great work is primarily the product of deliberate, explainable choices. Harrison’s phrasing flips the hierarchy. Thoughts are still there, but they trail behind intuition, not the other way around. That’s a producer’s mentality as much as a performer’s: you’re sculpting feel, not proving a thesis.

Contextually, it reads like a veteran’s answer to the modern obsession with process transparency. Today, artists are asked to narrate their creativity like a productivity hack. Harrison pushes back, gently: the best decisions often happen pre-verbal, before you can justify them on a podcast. It’s also a statement about confidence earned, not borrowed. Early on, you defer to theory, to taste-makers, to the fear of being wrong. Later, you follow the moment, because you’ve survived being wrong enough times to recognize when you’re right.