Creativity Quote by Al Jarreau

Jarreau’s line has the loose, backstage candor of a musician talking between takes: not a manifesto, more like a survival technique he’s tested on the road. “That’s the way I try to live” lands with the modesty of someone who’s spent decades watching certainty crack under pressure. He doesn’t claim he’s perfected anything. He’s practicing.

The phrase “at this point in our evolution as souls” is doing a lot of cultural work. It’s Jarreau importing a spiritual vocabulary that fits his era and his scene: post-’60s self-actualization, Black church cadence filtered through pop mysticism, the kind of cosmic language artists used to make relentless work and public exposure feel meaningful rather than depleting. He’s not arguing theology; he’s legitimizing empathy as something more than niceness. “Evolution” implies we’ve been forced into it. The world got faster, harsher, more crowded; the old armor (cynicism, isolation, ego) doesn’t cut it anymore.

Then he pivots to the plainest, most democratic clause: “where everyone in their lifetime is going through stuff.” That little “stuff” is the genius of it. It refuses spectacle. It compresses addiction, grief, burnout, racism, loneliness, illness, bills, all of it, into a word you can say without turning pain into performance. The subtext is a musician’s ethic: you don’t know what the person across from you dragged into the room, so you lead with grace. Not because it’s sentimental, but because it’s efficient, humane, and, in Jarreau’s view, the only way we’re going to keep harmonizing in public.