"Most good things happen with time; especially music, which needs time to breathe and to find its own way"
About this Quote
Against the algorithmic itch for instant payoff, Greg Ginn is making a slow-music manifesto. The line sounds gentle, but it’s a rebuke: if you’re treating songs like disposable content, you’re not just rushing the listener, you’re strangling the work. “Most good things happen with time” sets up a broader philosophy of craft, but he sharpens it with “especially music,” singling out an art form that people constantly demand on demand: quick hooks, quick drops, quick takes, quick judgment.
“Needs time to breathe” is telling. Breath is what live players take between phrases; it’s also what recordings lose when they’re over-edited, over-compressed, and optimized for loudness and immediacy. Ginn isn’t romanticizing laziness or endless tinkering. He’s defending incubation: the period when a riff stops being an idea and starts becoming a song, when a band stops playing at the music and starts playing inside it. The phrase “find its own way” personifies music as something with agency, which quietly shifts authority away from the market (or even the artist’s ego) toward the material itself. Let the song lead; don’t bully it into trend compliance.
Coming from Ginn - a punk and hardcore figure associated with urgency, speed, and abrasion - the subtext lands harder. It’s a reminder that intensity isn’t the same as haste. Even the most aggressive music benefits from patience: not to sand off its edges, but to make those edges deliberate, lived-in, and unmistakably its own.
“Needs time to breathe” is telling. Breath is what live players take between phrases; it’s also what recordings lose when they’re over-edited, over-compressed, and optimized for loudness and immediacy. Ginn isn’t romanticizing laziness or endless tinkering. He’s defending incubation: the period when a riff stops being an idea and starts becoming a song, when a band stops playing at the music and starts playing inside it. The phrase “find its own way” personifies music as something with agency, which quietly shifts authority away from the market (or even the artist’s ego) toward the material itself. Let the song lead; don’t bully it into trend compliance.
Coming from Ginn - a punk and hardcore figure associated with urgency, speed, and abrasion - the subtext lands harder. It’s a reminder that intensity isn’t the same as haste. Even the most aggressive music benefits from patience: not to sand off its edges, but to make those edges deliberate, lived-in, and unmistakably its own.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|
More Quotes by Greg
Add to List
