Creativity Quote by Lesley Garrett

Garrett’s line frames music less as entertainment than as sanctioned trespassing. The phrase “there to access” gives music a practical job, like a key kept on a lanyard: not inspiration in the abstract, but entry into rooms we’ve learned to lock. And she doesn’t romanticize what’s inside. “Dark emotional corners” suggests cluttered, unflattering feeling states - grief that doesn’t resolve cleanly, envy, shame, rage, loneliness - the stuff that polite conversation edits out and productivity culture tries to route around.

The cleverness is in the safety mechanism implied by “we don’t normally get too close to.” Music becomes a socially acceptable proxy for intimacy with yourself. You can sit in a concert hall, or put on headphones on the train, and let a melody do what therapy, prayer, or confession once did: bring you near difficult truths without demanding that you name them. That’s why it works. Music lets emotion remain partially unsaid, which is often the only way people can approach it at all. Lyrics can be too specific; talking can feel like a performance. Sound can hold ambiguity without collapsing it.

Coming from an opera singer, the context matters. Opera is built on outsized feeling - characters sing what most of us would swallow. Garrett is defending that tradition against the modern suspicion of melodrama. She’s arguing that art’s value isn’t escapism; it’s controlled exposure. You go to the edge, hear yourself in the darkness, and come back intact.