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Art & Creativity Quote by Gary Wright

"We lived on a farm in the English countryside, where we wrote a lot of our music. You really were treated like an artist during those days-not like product, which is now the mode"

About this Quote

There is nostalgia here, but it’s not the gooey kind; it’s a pointed grievance dressed up as pastoral memory. Gary Wright opens on the farm in the English countryside like it’s a studio and a sanctuary at once, a place where time stretches and the work can be messy, slow, and private. The image isn’t accidental. It evokes an era when musicians could incubate songs away from the glare, when making music was assumed to be an act of craft rather than an act of content production.

The key pivot is the blunt contrast: “artist” versus “product.” Wright isn’t just mourning aesthetics; he’s indicting a system. “Treated like an artist” suggests a whole ecosystem of respect: labels willing to bankroll experimentation, audiences patient enough for an album to find its shape, gatekeepers who believed the creator’s identity mattered more than the creator’s metrics. The dash - “not like product” - lands like a snapped guitar string, making the second clause feel colder, more corporate, more transactional.

“Which is now the mode” is quietly devastating because it frames commodification as fashion: not even a moral choice, just the current setting. That resignation is the subtext. Wright isn’t claiming the old days were pure; he’s noting that the default posture has flipped. Today, the musician is expected to behave like a brand: constant output, constant visibility, constant optimization. The farm isn’t just a place, it’s a rebuke - a reminder that art needs room, and room is what the modern pipeline keeps eliminating.

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TopicMusic
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Wright, Gary. (2026, January 16). We lived on a farm in the English countryside, where we wrote a lot of our music. You really were treated like an artist during those days-not like product, which is now the mode. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-lived-on-a-farm-in-the-english-countryside-135073/

Chicago Style
Wright, Gary. "We lived on a farm in the English countryside, where we wrote a lot of our music. You really were treated like an artist during those days-not like product, which is now the mode." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-lived-on-a-farm-in-the-english-countryside-135073/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We lived on a farm in the English countryside, where we wrote a lot of our music. You really were treated like an artist during those days-not like product, which is now the mode." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-lived-on-a-farm-in-the-english-countryside-135073/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Gary Wright (April 26, 1943 - September 4, 2023) was a Musician from USA.

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