new song from Wilco

“Love conquers all, but not when it’s used as a sedative, right? I worry that I’m often comfortable and placated by my ability to recognize and feel the love that already exists around me. What I see in myself and others is a struggle to summon sufficient outrage to act and then retreat into the delusion that the love that exists will eventually triumph. But it won’t! For love to triumph I believe we’re duty bound to create more of it, and for more people – people we don’t know, even people we don’t like! And that takes courage I don’t always have. The song is a reminder to myself to act with more love and courage and less outrage and anesthetized fear.” –Jeff Tweedy

quoted from NPR’s All Songs Considered podcast

evidence shows studying music improves academic performance

“Often, resources for music education—including the hiring of trained, specialized music educators, and band and stringed instruments—are cut or not available in elementary and secondary schools so that they could focus on math, science and English,” said Gouzouasis. “The irony is that music education—multiple years of high-quality instrumental learning and playing in a band or orchestra or singing in a choir at an advanced level—can be the very thing that improves all-around academic achievement and an ideal way to have students learn more holistically in schools.”

read the article from the University of British Columbia

and read the study here

quote from John F. Kennedy

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth… In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”John F. Kennedy, Oct. 26, 1963

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

click here to read part one of the interview

and here for part two