Creativity Quote by Bruce Johnston

The line captures a working artist’s double mission: make songs that reach people and keep chasing ideas that might never top a chart. Coming from Bruce Johnston, a Beach Boy who straddled the worlds of studio craft and pop accessibility, it reads as both credo and quiet defense. He entered the group as it moved from surf anthems toward more complex arrangements, and he brought a professional, almost orchestral sensibility shaped by Los Angeles studios. That background helps explain the emphasis on trying. Trying suggests risk, sessions that may not resolve cleanly, parts that get layered, stripped, rebuilt. It implies that commercial polish is only one outcome of a deeper process.

The phrasing also resists the false choice often imposed on pop musicians. Outright commercial is not a slur here; it is a pillar of the job. But alongside radio hooks, Johnston and his peers pursued harmonies with cathedral-like depth, unexpected chord changes, and textures that pulled in instruments far from the teen market. Think of the way the Beach Boys could deliver a singable single and, on the very next track, drift into a reflective miniature like Disney Girls (1957), where nostalgia, jazz-tinged chords, and detailed vocal blends create a mood too delicate to scream for airplay.

There is a historical charge to the statement, too. Mid-60s Los Angeles nurtured a breed of pop experimentalism: modular recording, the Wrecking Crew’s precision, and an ear for sonic color that let even a blockbuster like Good Vibrations carry genuine strangeness. Johnston stands at that intersection, acknowledging that craft aimed at the marketplace can coexist with curiosity and play.

The message endures beyond its era. Artists can honor listeners’ appetite for immediacy while reserving space for detours, afterthoughts, and brave misfires. The legacy of those attempts often outlasts the singles, shaping the vocabulary other musicians draw on when they try, again, to make something interesting.