Art & Creativity Quote by Jamie Muir

It reads like a confession that refuses the drama of confession. Muir doesn’t claim burnout, betrayal, or the usual rock-world grievances; he frames departure as obligation, almost clerical: “I felt I had to.” That wording matters. It strips the decision of swagger and recasts it as compliance with something inward and non-negotiable. In a culture that romanticizes the artist as someone who can’t not create, “give up music” lands like heresy.

The quote’s quiet force comes from what it withholds. “Experiences over a period of about six months” is a deliberately vague phrase, the kind you use when the real story feels either too private or too strange to translate into industry language. Buddhism here isn’t presented as a lifestyle accessory or a vibe; it’s positioned as a competing authority. The subtext is that music, or at least the life around it, had become spiritually incoherent: the ego, the noise, the momentum of a career all pulling against the discipline of attention and detachment.

Then there’s the almost comic banality of the final image: “so one morning” I went to the management office. The spiritual rupture gets narrated as admin. That’s the point. Muir is showing how radical choices often enter the world: not with a manifesto, but with a calm visit to the people who schedule your life. In the context of late-60s/early-70s experimentation, when Eastern spirituality was frequently folded into spectacle, his tone suggests a rare sincerity: not Buddhism as branding, but Buddhism as exit door.