"The passage of time is a continuing thing. At 18, you're going to live forever, and you are definitely not at 52, so that is a recurring topic. I still think it's the main stuff"
About this Quote
Time, for Hammill, isn’t a poetic abstraction; it’s a pressure wave that keeps hitting. The blunt phrasing - “a continuing thing” - almost refuses metaphor, like he’s stripping the romance out of aging to get at its relentless mechanics. That’s a very musician’s move: less thesis, more tempo. Time isn’t a concept, it’s the beat you can’t drop.
The quote pivots on the most recognizable illusion of youth: at 18 you “live forever.” He’s not mocking teenagers so much as naming the psychological oxygen that lets early adulthood feel infinite. The bite comes in the next clause, where 52 isn’t presented as tragic, just undeniably different. No melodrama, no heroic coping narrative. The implication is sharper: the body and the calendar don’t negotiate, and the self has to keep rewriting its story to match the facts.
Calling it “a recurring topic” reads like an artist’s confession and an aesthetic manifesto. Hammill’s work has long circled existential weather - dread, urgency, the sense that meaning is something you make under time’s surveillance. Here, he frames aging as material, not merely biography: the subject returns because it never resolves. The line “I still think it’s the main stuff” is both modest and defiant. After decades of songs, scenes, and reinventions, the core drama hasn’t changed: not fame, not trends, not even love as a slogan, but the ticking constraint that makes every other feeling feel real.
The quote pivots on the most recognizable illusion of youth: at 18 you “live forever.” He’s not mocking teenagers so much as naming the psychological oxygen that lets early adulthood feel infinite. The bite comes in the next clause, where 52 isn’t presented as tragic, just undeniably different. No melodrama, no heroic coping narrative. The implication is sharper: the body and the calendar don’t negotiate, and the self has to keep rewriting its story to match the facts.
Calling it “a recurring topic” reads like an artist’s confession and an aesthetic manifesto. Hammill’s work has long circled existential weather - dread, urgency, the sense that meaning is something you make under time’s surveillance. Here, he frames aging as material, not merely biography: the subject returns because it never resolves. The line “I still think it’s the main stuff” is both modest and defiant. After decades of songs, scenes, and reinventions, the core drama hasn’t changed: not fame, not trends, not even love as a slogan, but the ticking constraint that makes every other feeling feel real.
Quote Details
| Topic | Time |
|---|
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