Creativity Quote by Eberhard Weber

There is a quiet kind of bravery in admitting that your own signature can become a trap. Eberhard Weber is talking about craft at the moment it threatens to harden into a brand: a little brass here, a little ensemble there, but essentially a one-man sound world. The line "the rest was me" isn’t a flex; it’s a diagnosis. He’s describing a studio situation where control is also confinement, where the very coherence listeners praise starts to feel like repetition wearing a flattering mask.

"I knew I couldn't continue in this direction, even if people liked it" lands as a rebuke to the most reliable narcotic in music: approval. Weber is naming the pressure that comes with being "recognizable" in jazz and beyond, where audiences and labels often reward the familiar. The subtext is that success can be a subtle demand for self-cover versions, an endless replay of the choices that once felt risky.

The kicker, "because I can only duplicate myself", is both practical and existential. Practically, it’s an artist acknowledging the limits of a solitary production method: there are only so many arrangements, tones, and moods you can generate alone before the palette narrows. Existentially, it’s a refusal to confuse identity with innovation. For a musician associated with the spacious, meticulously textured ECM era, this reads like a pivot away from the polished solitude of auteurship toward collaboration, friction, surprise - the messy inputs that keep a personal language from turning into a private loop.