Creativity Quote by John Fahey

For Fahey, “opening up the unconscious” isn’t a mystical slogan so much as a work instruction: get out of your own way. Coming from a guitarist who built whole worlds out of country blues, ragtime, and eerily pastoral drift, the line reads like a quiet rebuke to the idea that composition is mainly planning, polish, and proving you’re smart. He’s pointing to a different engine: the parts of you that already know the tune before you can explain it.

The phrasing matters. “The other thing” suggests he’s already named the obvious mechanics - technique, structure, maybe theory - and now gestures at the hidden lever that makes those mechanics feel alive. In Fahey’s universe, the unconscious isn’t chaos; it’s an archive. It holds radio fragments, hymn cadences, field-noise Americana, private grief, muscle memory in the right hand. “Opening up” implies access, not invention: composition as listening, as letting material surface rather than forcing it into a concept.

Subtextually, it’s also a defense of his aesthetic position. Fahey’s “American Primitive” persona thrives on tensions: learned and self-taught, sacred and kitsch, disciplined and wandering. By elevating the unconscious, he legitimizes the intuitive leap that can’t be footnoted, while still sounding practical enough to satisfy a musician’s skepticism.

Context helps: late-20th-century guitar culture often prized either virtuoso display or faithful tradition. Fahey carves a third lane, where the “new” arrives through memory, accident, and obsession. The result is music that feels less composed than unearthed - like you stumbled onto someone else’s dream and recognized your own.