The New Year Quote by James Iha

There is a quiet flex in Iha's plainspoken logistics: the work happened in a room, not in a myth. In an era that loves to romanticize songwriting as solitary genius or studio wizardry, he frames creation as repetition, compromise, and time served. January, rehearsing, "just" doing it - the language drains glamour on purpose, which makes the outcome feel more earned. The band isn't an abstract brand here; it's a messy committee with amplifiers.

His emphasis on "as a band" is doing the real work. It's a claim about authorship and power: arrangements aren't handed down, they're negotiated. That matters in groups where one figure can easily become the face and de facto ruler. Iha's phrasing subtly insists on collective agency without picking a fight. You can hear the politics of credit, ego, and hierarchy being handled diplomatically through process talk.

The line "it got changed around a lot" signals a willingness to let songs be unstable, to treat them as prototypes rather than precious statements. That's a specific 90s rock ethic: authenticity located not in confession but in friction - loud rooms, iterative tinkering, and the band as a machine that only reveals the song after it's been stress-tested. The subtext is that the final track isn't the first idea; it's what survived rehearsal. In that survival story sits a definition of craft that feels almost radical now: patience, revision, and the humility to be edited by your bandmates.