Creativity Quote by Smokey Robinson

Smokey Robinson’s modesty here isn’t just politeness; it’s a worldview shaped by the way Black pop craftsmanship traveled in the 1960s and 70s: through other people’s mouths. In an industry that often treated songwriters as invisible labor, “flattered” is a strategic word. It frames the cover version not as theft or competition but as validation, a public vote that the melody and sentiment can survive outside the original voice.

The line also carries a quiet Motown pragmatism. Robinson came up in a hit factory where songs were built to move - across radio formats, across audiences, across performers. A great song, in that ecosystem, is meant to be portable. When he calls it “a blessing,” he’s acknowledging both art and economics without sounding like he’s counting royalties. It’s gratitude with grit underneath: he knows what it means for a composition to become a standard, to keep paying back long after the chart run is over.

There’s subtext in the passivity of “someone picks up.” He’s describing a cultural relay: a track gets lifted, reinterpreted, translated into a new era’s production and personality. For a writer as emotionally precise as Robinson, that’s the highest compliment - not that listeners adored his performance, but that other artists found enough truth in the bones of the song to stake their own identity on it. That’s authorship as endurance, not ego.