Leadership Quote by Pat Travers

There is a particular exhaustion baked into “a little waylaid along the way” - the kind of understatement musicians use when the real story is messier, costlier, and full of paperwork. Pat Travers isn’t mythologizing a comeback or dressing conflict up as destiny. He’s describing the slow, unglamorous violence of the music business: time siphoned off by management drama and legal fights, years turned into invoices, phone calls, depositions. “The whole problem started” frames it like an avoidable infection that spread, not an artistic crisis. The enemy isn’t writer’s block; it’s infrastructure.

The key phrase is “still trying to make albums while I was doing all of that.” That “still” carries the subtext of obligation and defiance at once. Travers positions recording not as a burst of inspiration but as labor performed under siege. It’s also a quiet rebuke to audiences who treat gaps in discographies as personal failings: why didn’t you just make the record? Because the artist was busy surviving the business around the art.

Context matters here: a working rock guitarist from a generation that came up in the label-and-manager era, when contracts could function like traps and the “team” could become the adversary. Travers is signaling that the narrative of a career isn’t only shaped by taste or talent; it’s shaped by who controls the rights, the money, and the calendar. The line reads less like confession than like a corrective: if you’re looking for the missing years, check the fine print.