Creativity Quote by Skitch Henderson

There is a weary candor to Skitch Henderson's phrasing: he grants the romance of creativity, then quietly repossesses it. "We try to say it's creative" sounds like an industry pep talk he has heard (and maybe delivered) a thousand times. The pivot - "but it is a business" - lands less like a complaint than a veteran's memo from the trenches. Henderson isn't dismissing artistry; he's naming the friction that defines modern music-making: imagination tethered to invoices.

The key tell is "today" and the half-finished clause about "crossing the boundaries". He's speaking from a moment when music had become expensive to scale up. Big bands, television orchestras, touring ensembles, studio time, union rules, travel, rights clearances - all the invisible infrastructure that turns a musical idea into something that can move through markets and media. "Cost factor" is blunt, almost bureaucratic language, and that's the point: the business vocabulary has colonized the way musicians are forced to think.

Subtextually, Henderson is defending compromise. If the public wants boundary-crossing - bigger productions, broader reach, higher polish - then someone has to pay for it, and paying introduces gatekeepers. The line exposes how "creative" can become a branding word that softens the reality of commerce, while also hinting at a musician's pragmatic pride: you can still make art inside a system that measures everything. In Henderson's world, artistry isn't pure; it's negotiated.