Art & Creativity Quote by Ben Harper

Ben Harper is doing something slyly ambitious here: he’s taking a sentence that could read like harmless “my playlists are eclectic” promo talk and using it as a soft-launch for artistic reinvention. The opening - “Right now I’m listening to a lot of different things” - signals range, but it’s also a familiar musician’s hedge, the polite way to avoid being pinned down to a genre or a brand. Then he pivots to the real tell: “but I listen to a lot of classical music.” That “but” matters. It’s a small act of repositioning, turning “different things” into a runway toward a canon that still functions as cultural capital.

The second line is the heart of it: “Eventually I would like to compose and perform classical.” Not “dabble,” not “be influenced by,” but compose and perform - claim authorship and legitimacy inside a field that historically gatekeeps through training, institutions, and coded ideas of seriousness. Harper frames it as “eventually,” which keeps the dream safely aspirational while still planting a flag for fans, critics, and collaborators: don’t file me away as just a roots-rock singer with a slide guitar.

The subtext is less about taste than permission. By aligning himself with classical music, Harper is arguing for a longer arc than the pop marketplace usually allows: the artist as someone who matures, studies, risks embarrassment, and refuses to be frozen in the era that first made him famous.