Time & Perspective Quote by Billy Sherwood

Sherwood’s line lands like a shrug, but it’s really a flex: writing isn’t an “album cycle” activity, it’s a permanent mode of being. The phrasing is casual, almost offhand, yet it quietly asserts discipline. Not inspiration, not lightning strikes - repetition. He frames creativity as maintenance: you write the way you tune an instrument, because if you don’t, you drift.

The subtext is about legitimacy in a world that loves mythology. Rock culture still sells the romantic image of the songwriter as a vessel who occasionally receives The Big Idea. Sherwood pushes back with something more workmanlike: constant output. That matters coming from a career musician best known for collaboration and long-running legacy acts (especially in prog, where craft and architecture are the point). In that ecosystem, “lyrics as well” is doing extra work. It signals he’s not only arranging and producing - roles that can be dismissed as technical - but also tending to the supposedly sacred inner core of a song: the words.

The intent feels twofold: to normalize the grind and to widen the definition of writing. Notebooks, half-finished verses, stray hooks, studio edits - it all counts. He’s also sneaking in a philosophy of readiness: if you write all the time, you’re prepared when a band needs a chorus tomorrow, when a concept record demands connective tissue, when the muse is late but the session isn’t. It’s less romantic, more durable, and that’s the point.