Creativity Quote by Andy Summers

Summers isn’t just describing a sonic preference; he’s sketching a worldview where music is less about showing off and more about creating weather. “High, spacey” points to tones that hover rather than punch - harmonics, sustained notes, guitar treated like an atmosphere generator instead of a riff machine. It’s a musician’s way of saying: I’m drawn to what surrounds the song, not merely what leads it.

The subtext is almost a quiet manifesto against rock’s default machismo. Summers came up in an era when guitar heroes were rewarded for volume, speed, and dominance. His phrasing favors distance and dimension: “spacey” implies room to breathe, “ambient” implies mood over argument. That preference maps neatly onto his role in The Police, where his guitar often acted like a second nervous system around Sting’s lines and Stewart Copeland’s snap-tight rhythms. He wasn’t competing for the spotlight so much as bending the light.

Context matters because Summers helped mainstream a kind of textural guitar vocabulary - chorus, delay, reverb, and careful restraint - that later became a toolkit for post-punk, new wave, and ambient-pop production. The intent here reads like a gentle defense of subtlety: the “favorite sounds” aren’t dramatic because they don’t need to be. They do their work by changing the air in the room, turning a three-piece band into something widescreen.