Time & Perspective Quote by Dan Hicks

There is a stubbornly practical humility in Dan Hicks framing ambition as a present-tense craft problem: get a good band, build a good act, be a good performer. It reads like a musician talking himself away from the industry mirage - the big “career move,” the mythic next record - and back toward the only thing that can’t be faked: what happens when the lights come up. Hicks isn’t selling a manifesto. He’s re-centering value on the stage, where charisma, timing, and ensemble chemistry either land or they don’t.

The repeated “good” isn’t vagueness; it’s a code word for standards. “Good band” means trust, groove, shared taste. “Good act” signals something shaped, not just a setlist - pacing, banter, the social contract with an audience. “Good performer” is the ego-check at the heart of it: in a culture that treats studio polish as proof of genius, Hicks is insisting that performance is the real résumé.

Then he ties “future recordings” to that live core, almost demoting them: recordings are downstream of the act, not the other way around. That’s a quietly oppositional stance in an era when artists can be pushed to chase product cycles. Hicks, who built a career on sly genre-mixing and an unforced, hangout intimacy, is basically saying the next “tunes” will come if the band is right and the room is alive. It’s not anti-ambition; it’s ambition that refuses to skip the human part.