“My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.” —John Lennon
Author: MoST
interview with Jay Sweet
“The spirit of servitude that [Pete] Seeger brought to the world didn’t die when he passed away in 2014, and that fact is perhaps most evident at Newport Folk Festival, the now-iconic event that Seeger helped George Wein get off the ground in 1959. “The spirit of Pete, and of Pete’s egalitarian nature, is in every ounce of this festival’s DNA,” says Jay Sweet, executive producer of Newport Festivals.” —Dacey Orr Sivewright in The Bluegrass Situation, 5/22/2019
quote from Glen Hansard
“I choose to believe that there is good in people and that everything is a lesson. Our place on Earth is to go deeper, to somehow get wiser. To have spirit.” —Glen Hansard
quote from Patti Smith
“We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it’s opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There’s so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.” — Patti Smith, 2015
quote from Kris Kristofferson
“I think that a society lives or dies according to its respect for its art.” —Kris Kristofferson, 1995
interview with Mavis Staples
“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
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
