Art & Creativity Quote by Michael Storm

Trend-chasing rarely sounds this casual, and that’s the point. Michael Storm frames a potentially cynical career pivot as a shrug: folk is “all the rage,” so the banjo becomes a guitar. The line lands because it treats identity not as sacred essence but as equipment you swap when the room changes. Coming from an actor, it reads like an inside joke about any performance economy: you don’t just learn lines; you learn what the audience is currently paying to hear.

The banjo-to-guitar switch is doing quiet cultural work. The banjo codes as older-timey, rural, and unmistakably “folk” in a pre-revival sense; the guitar, especially in mid-century America, is the more versatile passport instrument. It can signal folk authenticity, but it can also slide into pop, rock, coffeehouse confessional, even studio professionalism. Storm’s phrasing suggests he’s not pledging allegiance to a movement so much as acquiring fluency in the dominant accent.

“Moved back to the US” is the second hinge. It implies a return to a scene with its own fashions and gatekeepers, where being legible matters. The subtext isn’t just opportunism; it’s survival and translation: how immigrants, returnees, or outsiders often recalibrate to avoid being stranded outside the cultural conversation.

There’s also an affectionate bite. Calling folk “all the rage” gently punctures the genre’s self-mythology of purity and timelessness. If authenticity can be updated with a simple trade-in, Storm implies, maybe the boom was always part music and part costume.