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Aging & Wisdom Quote by Kelly Jones

"The press will naturally come and go as it has done with all artists, from David Bowie to Neil Young to U2"

About this Quote

There is a shrug baked into Kelly Jones's line, and it lands like a survival tactic. By framing media attention as something that "naturally" ebbs and flows, he takes a force that can feel personal, punitive, even humiliating, and recasts it as weather: impersonal, cyclical, not worth negotiating with. The word choice is doing quiet work here. "Will naturally" implies inevitability, which is comforting if you're an artist being sized up by headlines that can turn on you overnight.

The name-drop ladder matters: Bowie, Neil Young, U2. That's not just reverence; it's scale. Jones is placing himself and his band inside a lineage where press scrutiny is less a referendum on talent than a recurring tax on visibility. Bowie signals reinvention and the press's obsession with persona. Neil Young evokes the "difficult genius" narrative and the long arc of credibility. U2 is a reminder that even stadium-level success can't inoculate you against backlash when cultural taste shifts. The subtext is almost managerial: if icons get cycled through adoration and annoyance, then your own rough patch isn't a unique failure - it's the cost of remaining in the conversation.

Contextually, it reads like a veteran musician talking from the other side of hype. Not begging for approval, not declaring war on critics either - just demoting them. The intent is to keep the band's identity anchored in the work, not the coverage, while signaling a kind of pragmatic confidence: we're not chasing the press; we're outlasting it.

Quote Details

TopicMusic
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Jones, Kelly. (2026, January 17). The press will naturally come and go as it has done with all artists, from David Bowie to Neil Young to U2. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-press-will-naturally-come-and-go-as-it-has-81295/

Chicago Style
Jones, Kelly. "The press will naturally come and go as it has done with all artists, from David Bowie to Neil Young to U2." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-press-will-naturally-come-and-go-as-it-has-81295/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The press will naturally come and go as it has done with all artists, from David Bowie to Neil Young to U2." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-press-will-naturally-come-and-go-as-it-has-81295/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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The press will naturally come and go as it has done with all artists
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About the Author

Kelly Jones (born June 3, 1974) is a Musician from Welsh.

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