Creativity Quote by Evan Dando

There is a specific kind of shame baked into the phrase "too corporate": not just that something looks slick, but that it looks like it was made to be sold rather than made to be felt. Evan Dando is naming a trap that hits bands the moment they start functioning like a business. Success brings infrastructure - managers, label notes, branding conversations, the quiet pressure to be legible at a glance. "Some of our stuff" admits complicity without theatrics. He is not blaming suits; he is admitting that the band let the aesthetics drift toward the safe center.

The line works because "corporate" is doing double duty. It's a visual critique (the design language of press photos, merch, videos) and an ethical one (who is driving the decisions). In rock culture, authenticity is less a moral purity test than a style: rough edges, idiosyncrasy, the sense that a band would make the same choices even if no one were watching. "Too corporate" signals that those edges got sanded down.

"I'm going to be a lot stricter from now on" flips the usual artist-label dynamic. Dando casts himself as the new gatekeeper, taking back curatorial control over the band's image and output. Stricter doesn't sound romantic; it sounds like discipline, boundaries, veto power. The subtext is self-preservation: if the band starts resembling a product, the audience feels it, and the artist feels it first. This is less rebellion than recalibration - a musician insisting that the work should carry fingerprints, not fonts.