Creativity Quote by Aaron Neville

There is a hard, almost offhand bluntness in "Me and my partners had been stealing cars for a while" that lands like a bass note under Aaron Neville's later public image: velvet-voiced romantic, New Orleans soul royalty, the guy you expect to sing you out of trouble, not admit he once made it.

The phrasing matters. "Me and my partners" sounds casual, even collegial, swapping the language of crime for the language of work. Partners implies a crew, a system, a routine - not a single bad night but an informal economy. "Had been...for a while" does the same quiet work: it normalizes the behavior, frames it as a chapter with momentum, and hints at the slow drift of choices that become a life before you notice. There's no flourish of guilt or bravado, which makes it more credible and more unsettling; the line refuses the audience the comfort of a neat moral performance.

Contextually, it points to the pressure-cooker realities of mid-century New Orleans: limited opportunity, street-level entrepreneurship, the way poverty and proximity to vice can turn delinquency into a kind of apprenticeship. Subtext: survival and belonging are often bundled together. You don't just steal cars; you join something.

Coming from a musician, it also reads like origin-story honesty - a reminder that the sweetest voices can carry jagged histories, and that American fame often airbrushes the mess that came before the microphone.