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Creativity Quote by Edwin Starr

"You can only be lucky if you have a place to record"

About this Quote

Luck, in Edwin Starr's telling, isn't a cosmic lottery ticket; it's studio time, tape, and someone willing to press Record. Coming from a soul singer who watched trends, labels, and gatekeepers make and break careers, the line reframes "making it" as infrastructure rather than destiny. It's a working musician's corrective to the mythology that talent plus vibes equals success.

The intent is practical, almost blunt: opportunity only counts if you can capture it. The subtext is sharper. A "place to record" isn't just four walls and a microphone; it's money, access, relationships, and a small circle of people who believe you're worth documenting. Starr is pointing at the hidden bottleneck in music: performance is fleeting, but recording is leverage. The song that changes your life has to exist as a reproducible object before radio, DJs, playlists, and audiences can circulate it. Without that, "luck" evaporates the moment the gig ends.

Context matters. Starr's career straddled the era when studios were expensive, label-controlled spaces, and when recording was the difference between being a local legend and a name on a chart. Even his signature hit, "War", is proof of the mechanism: a raw, urgent message becomes culturally permanent because it was captured, distributed, and repeated. The line quietly critiques romantic narratives about merit: the world doesn't reward the best voice, it rewards the voice that gets archived.

Quote Details

TopicMotivational
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Starr, Edwin. (2026, January 15). You can only be lucky if you have a place to record. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-can-only-be-lucky-if-you-have-a-place-to-124144/

Chicago Style
Starr, Edwin. "You can only be lucky if you have a place to record." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-can-only-be-lucky-if-you-have-a-place-to-124144/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"You can only be lucky if you have a place to record." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-can-only-be-lucky-if-you-have-a-place-to-124144/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.

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Edwin Starr on luck, opportunity, and access
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About the Author

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Edwin Starr (January 21, 1942 - April 2, 2003) was a Musician from USA.

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