Creativity Quote by Brian May

Grit is the tell: Brian May is pointing to the guitar not as an instrument, but as a texture you can feel under your fingernails. Coming from the architect of Queen’s arena-sized harmonies, the line pushes back against the idea that “excitement” is only about volume, speed, or virtuosity. He’s talking about the guitar’s built-in friction: the way a pick scrapes a string, the way distortion turns clean notes into something bruised and human, the way small imperfections become personality instead of error. A piano can be thunderous; a synth can be infinite. The guitar, May argues, stays stubbornly physical.

The subtext is cultural. By the time May is making claims like this, rock has already fought its legitimacy battles and is starting to wrestle with its own museumification. The guitar gets pronounced “dead” every few years, replaced by laptops, playlists, and immaculate pop production. “Grit” is a refusal of that smoothness, a defense of the messy edge where performance sounds like risk. It’s also a subtle flex from a player famous for building his own sound (and even his own instrument): the guitar’s excitement isn’t generic, it’s authored, sculpted, hacked into shape.

There’s an implied audience here too: young musicians deciding whether to chase pristine perfection or chase a voice. May makes the case for the latter. The guitar matters because it carries struggle in the signal, and listeners can hear it.