Aging & Wisdom Quote by Thurston Moore

There is something quietly radical about a rock lifer calling his own band an “apprenticeship” and then declaring it finished. Thurston Moore’s line lands because it refuses the usual mythology: genius, youth, volatility, the idea that the best art is made in a blaze and then embalmed. “We’re like old people now playing music” isn’t a self-own so much as a flex disguised as humility. He’s puncturing the indie cool-kid economy where relevance is rented month to month. Old, here, means unbothered.

The subtext is relief. “I used to feel kind of anxious” reads like a candid admission of what experimentation often costs: the constant self-audit, the fear that you’re repeating yourself, the pressure to keep outrunning your past. Moore frames persistence as the cure. “I’m so glad we stuck it out because it’s a lot better” suggests that the payoff for endurance isn’t nostalgia; it’s control. You stop making work to prove you belong and start making work because you do.

Context matters: Moore is a key figure from a scene that fetishized rupture, noise, and newness (and where bands often collapsed under their own mythology). By labeling the early years “apprenticeship,” he demotes the celebrated chaos to craft training. The punchline is maturity as artistic freedom: not smoothing the edges, but finally knowing which edges are yours, and keeping them on purpose.