music is magic

When I was younger, I was skateboarding a lot. I was listening to music and skateboarding. There were two songs, that are widely different: DJ Shadow’s “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt,” and Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right.” And I remember skateboarding to them and they made me just stop. And the world felt so cool. I would look a... See more

My job is to be a musician and make music and do what is authentic to me and reflect my inner world in the most personal way possible. In songwriting, the most personal is the most universal. It's about using my own emotions as a connective tool.

She’s modeling radical self-acceptance on the world’s largest stage, giving the audience a space to revisit their own joy or pain, once dismissed or forgotten.

I think we all want to be heard and music is a way to let out our inner emotional life, sometimes in a way that can’t necessarily be understood any other way. It functions different than prose or storytelling in that the music has an emotional base to it, even without the words. So you can feel this energy and express whatever’s going on inside of

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“It's almost like she expanded time and created a space where we could all contemplate and feel and think together in her music.”

Through DJing, sampling, mixing, music embodies so much of what we’re exploring. It’s our job as builders to find references that “re-unlock” the values we’re trying to embody in the present, and turn these into new forms. Allow yourself the joy of losing yourself in the inputs; this is the nature of remixes or samples. We’re both looking at the wo... See more

I feel totally overwhelmed by the state of the world, but I think music and creativity, to me, is a way of exploring what's possible. There's always something when I'm making music that I didn't see that comes from nowhere and appears. When you go to create something, you're opening yourself up to possibility. It is a way that I continuously touch ... See more

Watch @jonbatiste turn Beethoven into the blues. It’s absolutely amazing.