Creativity Quote by Keith Emerson

You can hear a musician’s survival strategy hiding inside that casual imperative. “You’ve got to keep things flying” isn’t about aviation; it’s about momentum as a kind of craft, the way a live set, a band, or a career can stall if you stop feeding it motion. Keith Emerson came up in an era when rock wasn’t just songs but spectacle and risk: prog’s sprinting tempos, sudden time-signature turns, the sense that virtuosity should feel slightly dangerous. “Flying” is the perfect verb for that world. It implies lift, speed, and the ever-present possibility of a crash.

The intent is pragmatic: don’t let the energy drop. In performance terms, that means pushing transitions, keeping tension alive, never letting the audience feel the seams. In creative terms, it’s a warning against perfectionism’s dead air. Emerson’s music often sounds like it’s outrunning gravity - stacking classical references, synth leads, and rhythmic feints into something that stays aloft because it refuses to settle.

The subtext is more human: movement as defense. For artists wired like Emerson, stillness can look like decline - musically, culturally, personally. “You’ve got to” carries the faint pressure of someone who knows what happens when the machine slows: the crowd’s attention drifts, the band’s chemistry cools, the industry moves on. It’s also a quiet manifesto for prog at its best: complexity that doesn’t just impress, but propels. Keep it airborne, or it becomes museum music.