“No true musician can claim to embrace the music of someone without accepting as equal the human being from which it came. It is impossible to regard the influence of someone else’s creativity as great while judging the person who created it as somehow inferior.” — Warren Haynes, Newsweek, 6/24/2020
Category: article
David Handelman on coping with the COVID lockdown
“How have you been coping with COVID? If not the illness itself, then the whittled-down existence it has demanded?
I have a suggestion.” –David Handelman
click to read David’s blog post
live music comforts coronavirus patients and caregivers
“I’m hoping to offer a brief moment of comfort or distraction or beauty.” —Michelle Ross, violinist in Manhattan
click here to read the full NY Times article
RIP John Prine
“I guess I just process death differently than some folks. Realizing you’re not going to see that person again is always the most difficult part about it. But that feeling settles, and then you are glad you had that person in your life, and then the happiness and the sadness get all swirled up inside you. And then you’re this great, awful candy bar, walking around in a pair of shoes.” —John Prine, quoted by Pitchfork, 2018
read rememberances in Rolling Stone and The New York Times
art against coronavirus in Philadelphia
“What you’re seeing is empty businesses, empty schools, empty playgrounds. What is the emotional toll that takes? How can we replace some of that emptiness with images of hope, resilience, anger, and also dreams of a future that is hopefully not far off?” –Mark Strandquist, Mural Arts Philadelphia
quarantined Italians sing from their balconies
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Click here for a Vox.com article, with photos and additional links.
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quote from Steve Earle
“When I write something simple I’m always really proud of it. When you write something that simple with that much air in it and the whole premise behind it is something pretty obvious – that everybody wants to be happy and free – the song is sort of an exercise in not forgetting that’s what you really want and what you really need. We can get caught up in a lot of other stuff.” —Steve Earle, 2016
click here for the full rolling stone interview with Earle and Shawn Colvin
community-driven artist residencies in Mississippi
“You soak people in enough imagination, they see in each other what they can create.” –daniel johnson
2019 Kennedy Center Honors
“We would hope that art would bring us together as a nation, and make us all a little closer. We don’t want to, by any means, undermine the freedoms of the artist to see challenging things and to speak their truth, but at the same time it’s nice to see people brought together.” —LL Cool J, 12/8/2019
why music makes us feel
In a new paper, a team of USC computer scientists and psychologists teamed up to investigate how music affects how you act, feel and think.