Creativity Quote by Jon Crosby

There is a particular kind of disbelief that only arrives after you have paid your dues in public. Jon Crosby is talking about that whiplash: the memory of playing the South to "two people" colliding with a present where even unadvertised warm-up gigs sell out. The line isn’t polished, and that’s the point. Its power sits in the plainspoken math of a career turning over: from scarcity to excess, from begging for attention to trying to understand why attention suddenly sticks.

The subtext is equal parts gratitude and suspicion. "I don't know what's going on" reads less like false modesty than a musician watching the algorithmic era, word-of-mouth, touring circuits, and fan culture reshape the old rules. The detail that "most of those weren't even advertised" is the tell: traditional gatekeepers (radio, local promo, posters, press) aren’t the only fuel anymore. Something invisible is doing the marketing - momentum, community, maybe a song finding its way into the right playlists or scenes.

Crosby’s tone also carries a quiet elegy for the earlier version of himself. Playing to two people isn’t just a hardship; it’s an identity, a story you repeat to prove you earned whatever comes next. When success arrives so quickly it feels "so much different than it used to be", the brain searches for a cause, because the alternative is admitting how arbitrary the turn can feel. The quote captures the most honest part of "making it": not triumph, but disorientation.