"Maintaining our standard; that's our challenge day-in and day-out"
About this Quote
“Maintaining our standard” is the kind of phrase that sounds reassuring until you notice how much pressure it smuggles in. Tim Rice - a lyricist who built a career on big, durable emotions packaged for mass audiences - frames excellence not as a breakthrough but as upkeep. The drama isn’t in the mountaintop moment; it’s in the grind of staying worthy of your own reputation. That’s a very entertainment-industry mindset: your last win buys you exactly one more day of scrutiny.
The wording does quiet rhetorical work. “Our standard” is collective and institutional, not egoic. It implies a shared brand, a house style, a promise to an audience. Rice isn’t talking about inspiration descending like lightning; he’s talking about craft, consistency, and the unglamorous discipline of revision. It’s also defensive: standards exist because the market punishes drift. The subtext is that success creates a ceiling you have to live under.
“Challenge day-in and day-out” deliberately refuses the mythology of the artist as sporadic genius. It recasts creativity as a job with daily expectations, the way a long-running show has to deliver eight times a week. Coming from Rice, whose work sits at the intersection of pop immediacy and theatrical precision, the line reads like a mission statement for longevity: the audience may come for the spectacle, but they stay because the product doesn’t slip.
There’s pride here, but not complacency. The real flex is endurance - a standard you can repeat, on schedule, without losing the spark.
The wording does quiet rhetorical work. “Our standard” is collective and institutional, not egoic. It implies a shared brand, a house style, a promise to an audience. Rice isn’t talking about inspiration descending like lightning; he’s talking about craft, consistency, and the unglamorous discipline of revision. It’s also defensive: standards exist because the market punishes drift. The subtext is that success creates a ceiling you have to live under.
“Challenge day-in and day-out” deliberately refuses the mythology of the artist as sporadic genius. It recasts creativity as a job with daily expectations, the way a long-running show has to deliver eight times a week. Coming from Rice, whose work sits at the intersection of pop immediacy and theatrical precision, the line reads like a mission statement for longevity: the audience may come for the spectacle, but they stay because the product doesn’t slip.
There’s pride here, but not complacency. The real flex is endurance - a standard you can repeat, on schedule, without losing the spark.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work Ethic |
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