Creativity Quote by Jules Shear

There’s a deliberately unromantic calm in Jules Shear’s line, like someone tamping down the myth that music careers are powered by destiny or perfect nights. “Some gigs will go great” is the shrug that only comes from experience: you’ve played rooms where the sound is gorgeous and the crowd locks in, and you’ve played rooms where the monitors are trash and the bar TV is louder than your chorus. The point isn’t to deny the magic. It’s to refuse to worship it.

The second sentence is the real tell: “I figure you do a gig” lands like a workman’s creed. Shear frames performance as showing up, doing the job, and letting the rest fall where it may. That’s a subtle rejection of the modern obsession with optimization - the idea that if you post the right clip, book the perfect venue, hit the algorithm, you can engineer an audience. He’s describing a pre-virality economy of attention where the biggest variable isn’t your “strategy,” it’s who can physically get there.

“As many as can get there will get there” sounds almost fatalistic, but it’s also strangely liberating. It implies trust: in the songs, in the slow accrual of listeners, in the basic fairness of repetition. You can’t bully people into caring; you can only make the offer, night after night. In a culture that treats every show as a referendum, Shear’s intent is steadier: stop auditioning for validation and commit to the practice. That’s how longevity gets made.