“I’m singing these songs to inspire you, to keep you going, to lift you up and give you a reason to get up in the morning.” –Mavis Staples
Category: interview
quote from Arlo Guthrie
“Everywhere I go, I see all kinds of people at my shows – conservatives, liberals, new-agers, teen-agers, old pensioners. And for those people to have something in common is real interesting to me.” –Arlo Guthrie, 1991
quote from David Bowie
“I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go. I realised from the beginning that you could actually affect the way people saw things in quite a major way.” —David Bowie, 2002
quote from Roger Waters
“That’s why I call the show Us & Them, because I believe there is no ‘them.’ There’s only ‘us.'” —Roger Waters, June 2017
interview with Bill Frisell
“The music is a … model of what human beings can be. When you think of all the words you use to describe music, you say harmony or tension and release and consonance and dissonance, harmony, rhythm. It’s a way of fitting things together. It shows you how people can be together….” —Bill Frisell, Nevada Capital News 1/12/19
read and listen to the full interview in Nevada Capital News
the United Borders Project
fighting gang culture through music.
“To avoid hosting it in one crew’s ‘no-go’ area, Justin decided to set up the programme on a double-decker bus, which he then converted into a makeshift music studio and classroom. In the mornings, he would drive to Church Road, before moving onto Stonebridge in the afternoons.
“The idea to convert a double-decker bus into a studio came from a need to get my services to youths who had become cut off from certain colleges in Brent due to postcode violence,” he explains. “I know too many youths who would not dream of attending Willesden college because they are from Stonebridge. Crossing the Church Road divide would be seen as slipping, and vice versa.” — Justin Finlayson, founder of United Borders
Neko Case in tape op
“Everybody sings for different reasons. People use the term “vocal gymnastics” a lot. It’s usually used as a semi-negative term, but it’s a superpower. It’s not a superpower because you’re good at it, or as Bjorn Yttling would say, “It does not mean that you are ‘The Queen of Singing!'” It’s because you can do something physical with your body, like how I was talking about making a harmony with another person. It’s the same natural phenomenon that tore apart the Tacoma Narrows Bridge when it vibrated at a certain frequency. Feeling that vibration and resonance is heavy. It’s why a lot of times, a large group of people singing, even if they can’t sing, will make you start crying. It’s such a massive, unique way to communicate. It’s really heavy. It’s something that people used to understand a long time ago that we don’t really understand anymore. On a scientific level, sure; but I don’t think we understand it as a species anymore.“
interview with Sam Bush
Jon Batiste at the newport folk festival
“If I could boil it down to one lesson, it’s that everything is more connected than you think. It’s not only more connected than what we’re taught, but, really, there is no separation. It’s not something that we’re able to conceptualize as musicians or as people who throw ourselves into situations where we have to figure it out. For instance, if we had to go and live in a foreign country and be among a group of people who were supposedly much more different than us, I’m sure after a few years we’d be like, “This actually isn’t that different at all — in fact, it’s the same.” That’s such a fundamental lesson about humanity, and I think music is a really great place to explore that. If we don’t figure out our own understanding of that, then all of these myths and self-imposed barriers that we’ve built up over all this time will continue to just grow and grow. We’ll evolve to become something that we’re not meant to be. I guess the biggest lesson is the same thing that I’ve always been saying as an artist: Everything is way more the same than it is different, and if you just tap into that, the more you really begin to understand what that is. That’s my quest: to de-categorize American music. Music without borders. If I can de-categorize it, then that will be a great example of art reflecting what an ideal space for humanity to live in would be.“
The War and Treaty in the tennessean
“It’s an act of service,” said Blount-Trotter of The War and Treaty’s exhilarating, joyous performances. “To get up there and remind people how great they are, it’s a responsibility for us. We want to bring that joy to our audience.””Our duty as human beings is to love one another … (and) make sure that we all know just how much we matter,” Trotter added. “It’s not that we just matter, but we matter to one another.” —The War and Treaty, 8/8/2018