Creativity Quote by Richard Thompson

Thompson’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to the museum mentality of rock culture: the idea that the “real” work is what gets pressed, ranked, reissued, and eventually embalmed as legacy. He’s not dismissing records so much as demoting them from final product to evidence. The real job, he suggests, is contact.

The wording matters. “The thing I do, really” is a tightening of the frame, an artist stripping away what the industry praises him for. “Communication” is a curiously plain, almost unromantic word for music-making, and that’s the point. It refuses the mystical language of genius and replaces it with something closer to a craft ethic: you play, you listen, you adjust, you meet people where they are. Thompson has always been a performer with a songwriter’s bite and a guitarist’s precision; this reads like the worldview of someone who trusts the room more than the archive.

Subtext: records can lie. They can create the illusion of a definitive version, a fixed self, a clean narrative of “achievement.” Live communication is messier and therefore more honest: it admits risk, misfires, tempo shifts, the audience’s mood, the shared electricity that can’t be mastered after the fact. Coming from a British folk-rock figure whose career spans clubs, festivals, and decades of touring, it also nods to a tradition where songs are living objects, reshaped nightly rather than sealed in amber.

In an era where streaming turns “records” into content and metrics into identity, Thompson’s insistence feels almost radical: the art isn’t the artifact. It’s the relationship.