Time & Perspective Quote by Trevor Rabin

Rabin’s candor lands because it punctures the romantic myth of the artist as a monk with a single candle and a single masterpiece. He starts with a small confession - “I’ve done that quite often” - then immediately tightens the screw with “I’ve got to be quite honest,” as if he’s anticipating the purist’s objection: shouldn’t real creativity be orderly, one project at a time? His answer is basically: that’s not how the job works.

The key phrase is “there’s nothing you can do.” It’s not defeatist; it’s professional. Rabin is talking like a working musician and composer, not a muse-chasing auteur. In the world he comes from - bands, studios, deadlines, clients, collaborators - projects don’t politely queue up. They collide. Creativity becomes logistics: calendars, contracts, momentum, and the strange psychological trick of keeping multiple emotional worlds open at once.

The subtext is a quiet defense of craft over fantasy. “Sometimes you have to begin writing a new project just as you’re finishing off another” describes a mental gear-shift that’s both exhausting and strangely energizing: the fresh start helps you escape the claustrophobia of the nearly-finished piece, while the discipline of finishing keeps the new idea from becoming pure indulgence.

It also reads like a portrait of modern creative labor: fragmented, overlapping, always midstream. Rabin isn’t complaining so much as normalizing the overlap as the price of staying productive - and relevant - in a culture that rarely waits for anyone to be “ready.”