Terry Lewis, the often silent musician and lyricist behind too many hits, said a line in a Questlove interview that went straight into my notes.
“Most people don’t know what they like. They like what they know.”
Questlove was asking him and Jimmy Jam about if they’d ever felt pressure to modernize their sound. They had hits. They had hits across eras. But was anybody leaning on them to get with the times?
But Terry Lewis, being Terry Lewis, explains with his economy of words how they never saw it that way.
People want to give you advice. People who never did what you did. And you have to remember this.
They didn’t know they were going to like what you were doing until they got familiar with it and realized they liked it.
Don’t expect them to predict the future.
You just have to feel it.
