Creativity Quote by Tom Glazer

Glazer’s line reads like a quiet manifesto from someone who’s spent a lifetime watching culture move on without asking permission. There’s no grand claim to immortality here, just a musician’s clear-eyed familiarity with how songs travel: they stick, they fade, they resurface when the world is ready. The phrase “picked up again” is doing a lot of work. It suggests folk music’s particular afterlife, where a tune can disappear from radio and still survive in classrooms, family kitchens, summer camps, and small hands clapping on beat. Not canonized, just carried.

The shrugging nod to fate - “in the lap of the gods” - isn’t superstition so much as professional realism. Glazer knows that reception isn’t meritocratic. Audience taste, technology, gatekeepers, and timing all decide what gets preserved. By naming luck, he refuses the modern hustle myth that good work automatically wins.

The subtext is a defense against both vanity and bitterness. He sets a modest target: “work that I liked,” then a second, softer hope that it might matter to “some others,” even briefly. That sliding scale of time (minute, week, month, year) reframes success as contact rather than permanence. For a children’s and folk musician especially, that’s radical: the point isn’t to be endlessly replayed, it’s to become part of someone’s day, long enough to shape a mood, a memory, a sense of belonging. The art lasts as long as it’s useful. The rest is weather.