War & Peace Quote by Keith Emerson

Creativity, Emerson suggests, is less a lightning bolt than a contact sport. “We manage to bounce ideas off one another” frames collaboration as kinetic and slightly chaotic: thoughts aren’t delicately exchanged, they ricochet. For a band like Emerson, Lake & Palmer - built on virtuosity, ego, and high-stakes ambition - that verb choice matters. It hints at a rehearsal room where volume, speed, and insistence are features, not bugs.

The line “Every band fights” is a shrewd normalization move. He’s deflating the rock-myth of effortless brotherhood and replacing it with something more honest: friction is the price of having multiple strong tastes in one room. But he doesn’t romanticize dysfunction. The key phrase is “very positive about the way we fight,” which reads like a quiet flex in conflict management. The fight is not personal decay; it’s procedure. It’s a method for stress-testing ideas until only the strongest arrangement survives.

“At least we come out with a result” lands with a working musician’s pragmatism. It acknowledges the risk - fights can loop, sour, or split a group - while drawing a bright line between “productive conflict” and the kind that turns into tabloid soap opera. The subtext is accountability: if you’re going to clash, you’d better be able to point to the song, the riff, the final decision. In an era of rock excess and famously fragile bands, Emerson is arguing that maturity isn’t the absence of tension; it’s the ability to metabolize it into music.