Art & Creativity Quote by Dave Haywood

“To me the bottom line is: good music is good music” reads like a shrug, but it’s a strategic one. Coming from Dave Haywood - a musician who’s spent his career straddling country radio, pop hooks, and arena-scale collaboration - the line isn’t laziness so much as a boundary marker against the genre police. The repetition is the point: it flattens the hierarchy. Country vs. pop, “authentic” vs. “commercial,” critics vs. playlists - all of that gets waved off with a tautology that’s almost stubbornly unromantic.

The intent is inclusivity, but also permission. Haywood’s world is one where a song can be built in a Nashville writing room, polished with modern production, and still need to feel “real” to an audience trained to sniff out selling out. By reducing taste to a simple standard - good is good - he’s reframing legitimacy as craft and impact, not pedigree. It’s a defense of crossover without having to argue for it.

There’s subtext, too: this is an artist quietly rejecting the anxiety economy of music culture, where every release gets litigated as a moral choice. The phrase “bottom line” borrows business language, acknowledging the industry’s realities while insisting that the final metric isn’t charts or categories. It’s the gut-check of whether the song hits. In an era where algorithms corral listeners into micro-genres, Haywood’s tautology is a bid for a more human sorting system: does it move you or not?