Creativity Quote by Leo Kottke

Kottke’s sentence tumbles forward like an excited riff, and that’s the point: it’s discovery set to momentum. He’s describing the moment performance stops being a one-way dump of energy and becomes a feedback system. “Talk to them” doesn’t mean small talk. It’s code for reading a room, adjusting tempo and dynamics, letting silence land, nudging a crowd into the next emotional beat. The “whole other way to blow your stack” reframes what could be mere nerves or catharsis into something craftier: release through connection, not just through volume.

The subtext is that virtuosity alone isn’t the high. The high is agency. Once you realize an audience is responsive material, performance becomes playful and slightly dangerous: you can push, tease, stall, accelerate. That’s why the line keeps doubling back on itself with “and… and… and…” It mimics the addictive loop he’s confessing to. Stage time becomes an experiment whose results arrive instantly, through laughter, stillness, restlessness, applause.

There’s also a quiet democratizing impulse here. For an instrumentalist like Kottke, “talking” is partly literal banter, partly the guitar doing the speaking. He’s arguing that communication is the real instrument, and the crowd is part of the ensemble. The more “you get out of it,” the better not because it’s selfish, but because extraction and exchange are intertwined: if you’re getting something, they are too.