Interesting comment...and I agree. He is a technician...a brilliant one...but not an artist. I remember back in the ‘70s, I met an ‘artist’...he was an incredible technician too...but when he said to me “I don’t know what to paint” I knew he was not an artist.
Back in my Hollywood guitar slinger days, I was working a construction job at the home of a successful concert pianist. She was a nice lady, and very communicative.
We got to talking music, and I remarked to her how much I admired her ability to render the works of the classic masters at such a level of skill (you should have seen her studio....wow). In passing, I'd mentioned to her that I played guitar and wrote songs.
She thanked me for the compliment, then said to me that she admired what I did. I was puzzled, and asked her, "why?" She then told me that she didn't have the first idea of how to string chords together to create a song. I was actually dumbfounded, and insisted to her that it wasn't hard to do, and that with her education, surely she could write well, if she simply tried it.
She shook her head, and sort of laughed at that, then said, "No, that's all been trained out of me. I really couldn't write a song if I tried."
Talk about gaining a very interesting perspective.