Creativity Quote by Leo Kottke

Touring turns even the wildest music into shift work, and Leo Kottke is blunt about the hangover: repetition doesn’t just dull the audience, it dulls the performer from the inside. “Stale” here isn’t a minor off-night; it’s the creeping sense that muscle memory has replaced attention. For a guitarist famous for precision and oddball tunings, that’s basically an artistic emergency.

The fix he proposes is tellingly mischievous: “deliberately getting in trouble.” He’s not romanticizing chaos for its own sake; he’s describing a craft strategy. The “trouble” is technical and structural: choose risk, invite the possibility of failure, sabotage the autopilot. “Playing yourself into a corner” is stagecraft as self-imposed constraint, like changing the rules mid-game so you can’t rely on your usual moves. It’s the live version of writing with a limitation: you narrow the exits so invention becomes the only way out.

Subtext: artistry isn’t maintained by comfort, it’s maintained by productive discomfort. Kottke’s ethos pushes back against the consumer expectation that a touring musician should reproduce the record flawlessly, night after night. He’s arguing for performance as a living process, not a product. The corner is where presence returns: you have to listen harder, react faster, and commit publicly. That’s also why the line carries a quiet swagger. He trusts the years of technique enough to risk wrecking the moment, because the point isn’t avoiding mistakes; it’s reintroducing stakes.