"When you write a song, a song has longevity"
About this Quote
There is a quiet flex tucked into Smokey Robinson's plain-spoken line: songs outlive the noise around them, and the people who make them get to borrow some of that extra time. Coming from a Motown architect, it reads less like misty-eyed romance about creativity and more like a working musician's hard-earned math. You can tour, you can chase hits, you can be visible; but a song is an asset that keeps moving when you stop.
The intent is pragmatic and protective. Robinson is talking about authorship as permanence in an industry built on churn. Performances are perishable - tied to a night, a body, a trend. A well-written song travels: it gets covered, sampled, re-scored for commercials, wedged into weddings and funerals, passed down like a family phrase. "Longevity" is both artistic (it still lands) and economic (it still pays). For Black artists of his era, that subtext matters: writing credits were a pathway to power in a business that often siphoned it away.
The line works because it refuses to mythologize. No tortured-genius talk, no grand claims about changing the world. Just a simple causal chain: write it well, and it stays. The repetition of "song" sounds almost naive, which is the point; it makes the statement feel inevitable, like a rule you learn early and keep relearning. In the streaming age, where attention is shaved into seconds, Robinson's claim becomes both a challenge and a reassurance: the clock is brutal, but the right hook can still outrun it.
The intent is pragmatic and protective. Robinson is talking about authorship as permanence in an industry built on churn. Performances are perishable - tied to a night, a body, a trend. A well-written song travels: it gets covered, sampled, re-scored for commercials, wedged into weddings and funerals, passed down like a family phrase. "Longevity" is both artistic (it still lands) and economic (it still pays). For Black artists of his era, that subtext matters: writing credits were a pathway to power in a business that often siphoned it away.
The line works because it refuses to mythologize. No tortured-genius talk, no grand claims about changing the world. Just a simple causal chain: write it well, and it stays. The repetition of "song" sounds almost naive, which is the point; it makes the statement feel inevitable, like a rule you learn early and keep relearning. In the streaming age, where attention is shaved into seconds, Robinson's claim becomes both a challenge and a reassurance: the clock is brutal, but the right hook can still outrun it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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