Time & Perspective Quote by Leo Kottke

Kottke’s “yes” lands like a shrug with teeth: he’s answering a question about why he developed his own sound, and he refuses the romantic myth of pure genius. He starts with the blunt mechanics of it. “I couldn’t find anything to imitate” frames originality as a supply-chain problem. Influence wasn’t some sacred lineage he broke away from; it was simply unavailable, undocumented, not circulating where he lived or listened. That’s a quietly radical reminder of how much “innovation” depends on access: to records, to scenes, to mentors, to the idea that someone else already solved the problem you’re trying to solve.

Then he pivots to the deeper dissatisfaction: “what I heard on the radio didn’t bear any resemblance to what I wanted to hear on the guitar.” Radio stands in for the mass filter of the era, a machine that standardized taste and narrowed what counted as a “guitar sound.” Kottke’s subtext is not that mainstream music was bad, but that it was irrelevant to his private appetite. The phrase “what I wanted to hear” makes desire the engine, not ambition. He’s describing a musician’s most useful form of stubbornness: a refusal to accept the menu.

Contextually, it fits Kottke’s fingerstyle trajectory - intricate, percussive, almost orchestral playing that didn’t map neatly onto Top 40 expectations. The intent is disarmingly practical: if the world won’t broadcast the sound you’re craving, you build it yourself, and you call it necessity, not destiny.