Creativity Quote by Jim Sullivan

The line reads like a musician trying to describe a memory that won’t hold still, and choosing to honor the blur instead of pretending it’s crisp. “Lots of sessions” is studio talk: workaday hours, take after take, a rotating cast of players, the quiet bureaucracy of making music. But “makeup” (even if it’s a slip for “make up”) carries its own accidental poetry: sessions as both the components of a career and the cosmetic layer that disguises how messy that career feels from the inside.

The kicker is “a hazy part of my session life.” Sullivan isn’t selling the romantic myth of the studio as a temple; he’s describing it like someone describing years spent in windowless rooms under fluorescent lights, fueled by caffeine, deadlines, and half-remembered jokes between takes. “Session life” is telling, too: not “my life,” but a sub-life, a professional identity built out of other people’s songs. That’s where the subtext lands: the session musician’s paradox of omnipresence and anonymity. You’re everywhere on the record, yet your own narrative is fragmented into gigs.

Intent-wise, it’s an anti-anecdote. Instead of name-dropping who was in the room or mythologizing a famous track, he points to the fog. That refusal is its own credibility. In a culture that demands clean origin stories and behind-the-scenes certainty, Sullivan’s sentence insists that creative labor often feels like accumulation without clear borders: a career remembered less as milestones than as overlapping tapes, tempos, and late-night calls to “come in and play.”