Time & Perspective Quote by Mike McCready

Music, for Mike McCready, isn’t a museum piece you appraise; it’s a bodily jolt you chase. Calling it “a feel” is more than musicianly vagueness. It’s a quiet rebuke to the modern habit of turning songs into content: background noise, playlists, brand identity. McCready’s metric is simpler and harder to fake - does it still hit? The Rolling Stones become his proof of concept, a band so mythologized they could easily read as legacy wallpaper, yet he insists the pleasure is immediate and repeatable: “many times” and “every time.” That repetition matters. It frames joy not as a one-off epiphany but as a durable chemical reaction, the kind that makes people buy tickets decades into a career.

The subtext is lineage and permission. McCready, a guitarist associated with grunge’s seriousness and abrasion, name-checks the Stones to locate himself in a tradition where swagger and spectacle aren’t sins. “They are still around” sounds casual, but it’s loaded: endurance as artistic argument. Staying power becomes a form of credibility, a refusal to be filed away as an era.

Then comes the classic rock-and-sports cliche, “120 percent,” which lands less as math than as ethos. It’s a pledge against complacency, the fear every aging band carries: that the show becomes reenactment. McCready is telling you the goal isn’t to preserve a catalog; it’s to recreate the feeling on demand, night after night, like joy is a muscle you can keep training.