Creativity Quote by Mel Torme

Mel Torme is admitting, with a professional's candor, that the bottleneck in his craft isn't labor or technique - it's conviction. The line lands because it refuses the easy complaint that "they don't write songs like they used to". He explicitly rejects a dearth: there are plenty of songs. What's scarcer, for him, is material that earns the right to his obsessive attention, the kind of tune that justifies ten to fifteen hours of arranging - not polishing, arranging, which is where a singer like Torme turns a standard into a personal signature.

The subtext is a late-career artist talking about taste as both asset and burden. Experience sharpens your ear; it also narrows the gate. When you know how much work it takes to build a chart that swings, breathes, and surprises, you become less willing to spend that time on songs that feel thin, overfamiliar, or built for a market rather than a bandstand. His "confess" is doing real work: it's not a boast about standards, it's an acknowledgment that the shift might be in him as much as in the culture.

Contextually, this sits in the long arc from Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook - durable melodies designed to be reinterpreted - to an era where pop increasingly prized production, novelty, and self-contained recordings over adaptable compositions. Torme is measuring songs by how much arranging possibility they contain. He's not mourning the past so much as naming a changing economy of attention: fewer pieces feel worth the deep, time-expensive intimacy of making them sing twice.