Creativity Quote by Steve Forbert

There is a careful humility baked into Forbert's phrasing, the kind musicians learn when their biography risks turning into a legend. "I've had an advantage" frames his career not as destiny or pure merit, but as a confluence of timing, scene, and gatekeepers. He doesn't brag about being embraced by New York; he treats it like weather: something that happened, unevenly, and not guaranteed to the next person walking into the same clubs with the same songs.

The key move is "open public acceptance". Not just industry interest, not just a few tastemakers, but an ambient permission slip from the city itself. New York becomes less a backdrop than a social machine that decides who's allowed to be "real" in public. That word "open" implies visibility without disguise: he could arrive as himself and be received without having to translate his identity into a safer, more marketable version.

The subtext sits in "doesn't happen to just anyone", a quiet acknowledgment of the invisible filters that define music scenes: class, accent, network, look, confidence, geography, luck. Even in a supposedly democratic bohemia, acceptance is curated. Forbert's line also nods to the myth of New York as the ultimate proving ground; he punctures it by admitting the proving ground sometimes waves you through.

Context matters: the "transition you were talking about" suggests a shift from outsider to professional, from regional to national, from songwriter to public figure. Forbert is marking that threshold as precarious, and his own passage across it as unusually smooth.