Music:

Punch Brothers–Who’s Feeling Young
The Brilliance–Lent
Rachmaninoff–piano concerto No 2
Gorecki–Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
Eric Whitacre- When David Heard

Books:

The War of Art– Steve Pressfield
God-the World’s Future– Ted Peters
The Orthodox Heretic— Peter Rollins
Old School–Tobias Wolf

Movies:

Tree of Life
The Hunger Games (books were better, but I still enjoyed it)
Another Earth
Chronicle

I would also like to mention our friends over at Blue Like Jazz whose new movie comes out today! I’m not normally a fan of “Christian” movies, but Blue Like Jazz does a good job avoiding a lot of those sorts of trappings. It is pretty entertaining, and It’s worth checking out. You can get tickets at www.bluelikejazztickets.com

Ok, well I guess that could occupy you for a few hours. You guys have any recommendations for me? Especially in the music scene… I could use some new music.

But if you hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and lay prostrate with your face against the rocky floor, you may notice that your awareness of her will soon begin to wane. You may find that all you see down there is rock. Maybe some dirt or a crawling bug. These are the threads of her dress, but up close, it’s easy to lose her essence in the details.

I find this to be true of art.

Art is not created in ivory towers or scenic overlooks. The actual creation of beauty happens down into the valley with the dirt and the bugs. Art is created with blistered hands and stained clothes. The true artist treats each thread with the same care that she has for the whole dress. But down in the dirt, it is easy to lose perspective over time. It’s easy to start seeing rock rather than canyon, thread rather than dress–easy to be so focused on the single word in the lyric, that you can lose sight of the song, of why you even make music in the first place.

It is easy for the student to forget why she is in school at all. She is lost in term papers and quizzes, but loses perspective of what it means to be human in the blur of her frantic motion, and her experience as a student is limited by her narrowed perspective.

It’s easy for the dad to forget that in changing diapers and scrubbing dishes, he may very well be ushering the Kingdom of God into the world.

Sometimes it is good to step back and remember the bigger picture. I think that this has something to do with what Lent is about. It’s about remembering who we are and why are here. Lent is hiking up to the ledge again. It’s reminding us of our humanity again. We paint crosses of ash on our foreheads to remind us that we come from dust and to dust we shall return. We give up things we like as a way of taking a step back from the blur and chaos of our lives, taking a clean look at what we have set our hands to, gathering strength for another day of work in the valley.

So to all of us with weary and blistered fingers, I pray that we would find the strength to take a step back–to hike back up to the ledge again and remember the bigger picture of who we are and why we do what we do. We are sewing a dress—a dress that is the essence of goodness and beauty. It is like a Kingdom. It’s like a wedding dress. And when we remember this, may it fill us with courage to take a few deep breaths of that crisp desert air and descend once more into the valley where the work gets done.

There is something that happens live that is difficult to capture in a studio.  There is a power when there is a “we” that has purposefully joined their hearts together.    We have had some pretty incredible moments of connection in our live shows, but we’ve never had a way of sharing those moments with people outside of the ones at the show.  We’ve actually pitched the idea of a live album several times in the past to our label, but it never worked out.

We have recently fulfilled our contract with our label and are now free to make this album that we feel like we are supposed to make, but we can’t do it without your help.

The idea is to make a live album as well as a short film of sorts.  Rather than focusing on a single concert experience, we would like to record the majority of our upcoming Spring tour and compile the most “magical” moments that happen into one project.

One of our hopes in doing it this way is not only to gather from the best of our live experiences, but also to portray some of the diversity and beauty of the Body of Christ.  The extent of this project is going to be directly tied to the budget.  I have big dreams for what this could be, but we don’t have the resources to do it all ourselves.

To let you into my head a little bit, we are planning on doing a fair amount of international traveling this year, and I am imaging capturing expressions of the Body of Christ from all around the world.

For example, how cool would it be to have one song recorded with the Church gathered in a mainstream venue in New York City, but then the next song is being sung with the Church gathered working in an African orphanage or a basement in China?  How powerful would it be to bring a couple acoustic guitars and a string section into a room with a bunch of recovering drug addicts and sing “Beautiful Things” with them?  That’s the kind of thing we’d like to see on this film rather than just a traditional concert DVD.

To pull it off though, we are going to need to bring a bunch of gear and personnel out on tour with us, and that’s not cheap.  If we raised 30,000 dollars from Kickstarter, we could afford to get it done, but we’d still have to cut some corners.  Anything extra that we could raise over our bottom line goal would go towards making this project that much better.  As many problems as human religion has, we believe the Bride of Christ is beautiful and we’d like to put her on display a little bit to the world.

This is something that’s been rolling around in my head and heart for a long time, but we’ve never had a way to pull it off.  I’m hoping this could be the way.    Thanks for your prayers and consideration!

Grace and peace,

Michael

Visit the Kickstarter Page.

Lust may have a lot of the same feelings associated with it that love does. Desire. Passion. Arousal. But we all know that lust is not love. Lust is a shallow and cheap counterfeit for love that never satisfies the soul, only quiets the body for a moment. The pleasure and joy that comes from indulged lust is short-lived and shallow, but a life of true love is the richest and most satisfying life possible. The feeling of worth and importance that comes with the accolades of the crowd is a counterfeit for true confidence or self-worth rooted in the fact that you are the beloved of the Creator, fearfully and wonderfully made.

We see the difference between true love and public celebrity clearly in how quickly the public can turn on its celebrities. How quickly the press jumps on the offensive comment or tasteless wardrobe decision or the extra 10 pounds hanging over the bathing suit of the celebrities that we claim to love and respect.

How quickly the beloved pastor becomes the hated pastor when news of his affair surfaces. This demonstrates to us that it was not actually that pastor that we loved, but our ideas of what we thought he was. When he falls short of our expectations for him, we gladly feed his carcass to the wolves.

We do this because it is not the human beings that we direct our adoration towards that are the actual object of our adoration. It is the fame or importance that they embody in our minds. They are the objects that represent the importance, power, and love that we want for ourselves.

I’m certainly not claiming immunity to the allure of the currency of celebrity or the praise of others in my own life. As silly as I may believe all of the fanfare and objectification may be, there still was something pretty exciting about being nominated for the Grammy awards last year.

Some of our friends and family had come with us to LA for the awards. By this point in my life and career, I had already learned of the folly of putting too much stock in people’s opinions, but come on, this was the Grammy’s! That’s like the Super Bowl for a musician. We were nominated for two Grammy awards! This was an honor that very few musicians ever get. I realized that as well, so as all of us got dressed up pretty and went to the ceremony, I really tried to not get my hopes up for winning. I reminded myself that it was just people’s opinions and that it shouldn’t have any bearing on my contentment or happiness.

But then they started reading the names…

There is something about being in a room full of your heroes, the people that you are guilty of buying into the illusion of fame with yourself…and knowing that your name is potentially about to be called for winning of the biggest honor that your heroes and peers can possibly bestow upon you. A Grammy award.

“No, but it’s such an honor to just be nominated.” I remind myself.

“Yeah, but to win would be pretty awesome…” My other self replies.

“Don’t get too worked up about it.”

“Michael….this is the Grammy’s! Do you even know what you are going to say if you win?”

“Well, I haven’t thought too much about it because I didn’t want to get my hopes up…”

“Dude, what is wrong with you? Do you want to look like an idiot in front of the people that you most respect in the world? In front of your friends and family that flew all the way out here to be with you in this moment?”

“Oh man.”

I asked Lisa for a pen and paper, and started scribbling out some notes on who I should thank if we won. In the process of this, I really began to visualize myself walking up to that podium. I imagined really holding that same golden gramophone that people like the Miles Davis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson were ecstatic to win.

I looked at the program and saw that they were almost to our category. My heart started beating so loud and fast that I almost certain people around me could hear it. Quest Love from the Roots was sitting right in front of me, could he hear my heartbeat, my quickened breath? Did he know that I must be in this next category just from the rustling and whispering of our group right behind him?

Oh, here it is! I grab Lisa’s hand, and we look at each other with barely containable anxiety and excitement in our eyes. To hear the announcer pronounce Gungor in the list of nominees is a surreal sound. And the winner is…

”Switchfoot, Hello Hurricane”. I don’t hear the applause. I hear the disappointed sighs of the people in our row. I look at Lisa and that polite smile that you see the losers of tv shows like American idol feign in an attempt to keep their dignity and pretend that they really preferred that the person would win anyway. The smile that you use to deceive your own body with, desperately trying to convince yourself that you really are not extremely disappointed. This happened twice in a row, as we had been nominated for two different categories.

I was kind of mad at myself that day. I was mad at how disappointed I was. I knew in my mind that things like awards are foolish things to base any sort of happiness or contentment on because even if you win an award, there’s going to be a year when you don’t win that award… If you tie your sense of worth as an artist to the fact that your last album went gold, what happens when the next record doesn’t sell quite as well as this? Because that will happen. We all age. We all die. Everyone’s work is temporary. Every piece of music written is like a scribble in the sand of a seashore. Eventually a wave is going to come and wipe that sand as smooth and clean as it was before you got there.

Every book, every film, every calculation and dollar made. It all will go back to the sea eventually. Every Grammy Award eventually will end up back in the soil from whence it came. Holding on to the fleeting glances of approval as your emotional lifeboat or planting your feet on the shifting sands of critics and fans is a surefire way to not be happy. If you invest your soul into the hopes that everyone will like you, you have a 100 percent chance of losing your investment.

This is what I knew in my mind at the Grammy Awards, but I found out that something in my heart still believed otherwise. I still allowed my happiness and sense of worth get tied to the opinions of other people, in this case incarnated as a little gold trophy. In reality, that gramophone represented my desire to feel important, to feel safe and loved. Of course to say such things out loud would be silliness, but there we sat in our finest clothes with frowns on our faces.

We actually were nominated again this year for Ghosts Upon the Earth, and while I am again honored and grateful for the nomination, I do hope that I can untangle my heart from all of it a little better and just enjoy the party regardless of who wins. I know that it is easier said than done though.

iTunes ® and Relevant Among Critics Celebrating Ghosts Upon the Earth As One of the Year’s Finest Releases

 Nashville, Tenn. Dec. 15, 2011… Just days after scoring their third GRAMMY ® nomination, Gungor is announcing a headlining tour sponsored by long time supporters Relevant Magazine. With stops in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and more, the “Ghosts Upon the Earth Tour” will launch March 1 in Austin, TX and feature special guest The Brilliance. To purchase tickets or to check out the latest information on each of the tour stops, click here.

Amidst the tour announcement, iTunes ® heralded Gungor as the iTunes ® Rewind 2011 pick for “Christian & Gospel Breakout Artist of the Year.” Relevant Magazine also backed the band’s latest Ghosts Upon the Earth naming it “The Best Musical Surprise of 2011.”

When you first listen to Gungor, the full sound belies the fact that the collective is primarily led by husband-and-wife duo Michael and Lisa Gungor. With stirring cellos, driving drums and delicate harmonies, their first album innovated both the sound and the language of worship music as Christians know it today. (If you don’t believe us,watch their performance of “Beautiful Things” at RELEVANT Studios last year.) They recently released Ghosts Upon the Earth, which represented a stylistic departure for the band. Gone were the soaring arena choruses, and in their place Gungor put in careful, driving chamber pop. The result is an album steeped in mystery, beauty and, well, spirituality. The band recently sat down with us to discuss the new album, theology and why, just as with God, you can’t put worship in a box.

RELEVANT: Your music is very spiritual—much more spiritual than general-market listeners are probably used to, yet you don’t want to be labeled as “Christian music.” Why is that?

Michael Gungor: Music, to me, was always very spiritual. I pretty much learned how to “do” music in church, playing in the worship band. Music always touched me in a deep place in my soul. Spirituality and faith and all the stuff we write about and worship itself—those are coming from the deepest places in my soul. What I love about music is that it has this ability to get beneath the surface of things and speak from and to the soul. Part of what I don’t like about the labels of Christian music is that, first of all, we don’t classify other music like that. We don’t say “atheistic music” or “humanistic music”—we don’t lump that all together as if that is the foundation. If it’s art, we’re all saying something. To me it’s just an odd way of separating it; it’s a word game, really.

How has your theology informed the kind of music you make?

MG: It’s interesting—it actually has informed it in its entirety, not just the lyric content. The entire idea of what it means to be a Jesus follower in this world has shifted from what it used to mean. It left realms like art, even caring for the poor. You hear Jesus talking about it, but even in the theology I grew up with, it never really made sense to me why Jesus would stress something like that so much. That didn’t fit my big story of what it was all about. These kind of philosophical things seem abstract on some level, but for me it really gave me an impetus to create as a sacred act, to bring order into creation. To order creation in a way that is meaningful and sacred. Growing up, I felt like if I wanted to really be selfless and serve God with my gift, then it had to fit into a certain category. You know: “You’d better have enough Jesuses per minute if you really want to write a song and have it please God. If you really want to do a lot with your life, you’re supposed to join full-time ministry and work for a church.” That was just kind of the mindset I grew up with….

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Produced by the group’s namesake, Michael Gungor, Ghosts Upon The Earth was primarily written by Michael and his wife Lisa who is also a featured vocalist in this musical collective. Recorded in numerous locations, including the Gungor’s home, the album also includes seventeen players, four additional vocalists, a six-person string ensemble and a boy’s choir. Inspiration for the album was orchestrated from Gungor’s weeklong meditation in Assisi where he was inspired by the Saint’s view of the world, as well as from the birth of their daughter last year.

Gungor just wrapped the hugely successful “7 Tour” featuring David Crowder*Band, John Mark McMillan and Chris August. The line-up sold out in 75% of the markets including stops in New York City, Dallas, Portland and more.

This is surprisingly easy to do.

Especially when you talk about radio stations. It is easy for me to spot a Christian music radio station within about 3 seconds. Far before any Christian lingo is uttered to make it clear.

It’s weird. I’m always trying to figure out what it is that makes something sound like Christian music, because there’s definitely something… I’d love to get some of your thoughts about it. But for me (and I’m actually one of the better players of the game if I must say so myself), I find something very disingenuous about most Christian music. This is something I can simply feel at a gut level. If I hear a song, and I hear any sort of pretending or false emotion, that’s a good first indicator. I’m really not trying to throw mud here, I’m being honest at how I am good at this game. Christian music often has a sheen to it that other music doesn’t have. Some pop and country music has a similar sheen, but the Christian sheen is like a blander sheen somehow.

The vocals are always really hot in the mix because for Christian music, the words are the most important part. That’s kind of similar to country though as well, so you have to be careful there. Country has some of the same Nashville tones, players, and compression styles that Christian music has most of the time, but the twang is just a little deeper with the country side of things. There’s also a little more “humanness” or “soul” in Country to my ears.

The false emotion that I’m talking about might be familiar to some of you. There’s just something more believable about the whispery sexy voice that is singing about sex on the mainstream radio station than the voice that copies that style of singing while putting lyrics in about being in the arms of Jesus. And it’s really not even the style or the lyric that is the problem to me, it’s the fact that I don’t believe that the singer is feeling the kind of emotions in singing that lyric that would lead to that style of singing. It’s that same kind of creep out that you feel when somebody gives a really loud fake laugh. It’s just weird and uncomfortable feeling.

An example of this would be a song that somebody sent us recently of an older song of mine called “Wrap Me In Your Arms.” The lyric is a very intimate and soft sort of lyric. “Take me to that place where I can be with you, you can make me like you…etc” This person did a hardcore/screamo version of this song. Not just like getting a little loud, I mean full out death metal sounding, demon-voiced screaming. It was so freaking weird mostly because it seemed so disingenuous. You would never speak such gentle words to someone you loved by screaming in their face like you were possessed by Beelzebub. That’s an extreme example, but it’s very typical of the basic premise of most Christian music to me, which is–use whatever musical style you wish as a medium to communicate your message. It’s not about the art, it’s about the message. So use whatever tools and mediums you have at your fingertips to do so. If you want to reach emo kids, then sing emo music but with Jesus language. The problem with this is that emo music is not simply reducible to certain sounding tones and chords. There are emotions and attitudes of different genres of music that are the soul of the music. You can’t remove the anger from screamo and have it still be screamo. It’s the soul of that music, whether that soul is good or evil is not the point, simply that it is the soul. So when you remove the soul from music and transplant the body parts (chord changes, instrumentation, dress, lights, and everything but the soul…) and parade it around with some more “positive” lyrics posing as Christian music, then what you have is a musical zombie.

It looks like a human.. It eats like a human… It still walks and makes noise and resembles a human, but it’s not. It’s a zombie. It has no soul. It just uses it’s human body for its own purposes.

This is what I initially feel when I play the “Christian or secular” game. I look into its eyes, and I perceive whether the thing has a soul or not. And 9 times out of ten, I can do it very quickly and efficiently.

Why is this like this? I don’t know, and it makes me very sad. I don’t hate all Christian music. There are a few artists that I know in the Christian industry that are really trying to transcend the inherent limitations and zombying effect of the industry. But the industry as a whole is broken, friends. We call it Christian, but it’s certainly not based in Christianity. It is based on marketing. That’s it. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but it wouldn’t be true.

Example:

We just were part of one of the biggest tours of the fall in the Christian music industry. To my knowledge, every night but one night was sold out, and that’s because they added a second show in the same city kind of last minute. The interesting thing about this tour was that it was pretty much in all mainstream venues. Clubs, theatres…etc It was awesome.

But you know what made me sad? That empty bar every night.

Even though these shows were all sold out, I would imagine that the bartenders at all those clubs were like “oh man, Christian night… that means no tips for me.”

Sometimes the promoters would just buy out the bar so there wouldn’t be any liquor sales at all.
I’m not saying that I wished that everybody was getting hammered at the show… But for crying out loud, buy one beer. Or heck, if you don’t drink beer, buy a Coke.

But here’s what is super weird about this situation. I bet you if you took all of those Christians that came to the shows and split them up and had them go to “secular” shows, A LOT of them would have bought a drink. It’s the fact that there is this assumption among all of the Christians there that having a drink at a Christian event is sort of a questionable thing to do.

Why is this?

It’s certainly not because of the Bible. Jesus’ first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding. And not just any wine. The kind of wine that made people think they saved the very best wine until the end. And you preachers who pervert the scriptures with your own extremely biased interpretations, here’s a news flash, people at parties don’t think the best wine is non-alcoholic grape juice. Religious people didn’t call Jesus “a glutton and a drunkard” because he ate communion loafers and grape juice all of the time.

Sheesh. It’s just so ridiculous to me.

And here’s the thing. I don’t even drink very much. I’ve never really been drunk, and I’m not advocating that people should just be foolish with their drinking or eating habits. But for crying out loud, this whole spiritualizing of alcohol being an inherently bad thing is so annoying. It’s mostly just an American thing, by the way (as well as places where America has exported these ideas with our missionaries). If you go most other places in the world, or anywhere else in history for that matter, Christians drink alcohol. Ever heard of a little thing called Communion? You know, the bread and the wine? That’s a pretty big deal in Christianity. Jesus didn’t pour out a cup of grape juice.

Man alive.

You know what the alcohol thing is based on? You ready for this? You sure?

Money.

Old people are the people that give the most money to Christian organizations like religious media outlets. And old people grew up in a time where alcohol was seen as a taboo social reality. Just like dancing or playing cards or “mixed bathing” (swimming). It’s based in an era of prohibition. These are old American values that we’re dealing with, not Christian values. It’s the old American people that have money that the Christian organizations do not want to offend. So they create an environment where drinking is seen as evil. If you want to start a television ministry, you can’t have it known to your donors that your staff likes to go out for drinks after work. So you implement rules for them. Do you know how common this is? I have friends that have lost their jobs over crap like this.

Do you see the irony of this? If you had been a disciple of Jesus and drank some of the wine of his first recorded miracle with him, you would be fired from a lot of the churches in this country. Shame on us.

So the point? (I haven’t forgotten) The point is that the industry that labels things as Christian and sells them to you has far more to do with marketing then Christianity. They are marketing to the mixed bag of values that has created the Evangelical Christian subculture. It’s a mix of some historically Christian values, some American values, and a whole lot of cultural boundary markers that set “us” apart from “them.” This sort of system makes us feel safe and right, and it makes some of its gatekeepers very wealthy and powerful.

The effect is then the filtering down of this subculture to people that don’t necessarily want to think through the viability of every one of these boundary markers, but in their simple desire to belong to what they consider the good guys, they acquiesce to the rules handed to them. At least in public. As the joke goes, why do you take two Baptists with you when you go fishing? Because if you only bring one, he’ll drink all your beer.

Here are some of the actual effects of this subculture though.

1. It makes us dishonest

When the foundation of the market and music you are trying to make is pretense, it’s very hard to be honest and successful. There is an unspoken assumption from most of us that we really want the people on the stage or on the book or album cover or on the radio need to have it together more than we do. Because we are messed up, we need them to be a sort of savior and hope for us. The result of this is that it’s often the people who are really good at pretending that they have it all together that make it to the stage and the book or album cover and the radio stations.

So Christians that would normally buy a beer don’t because they are in the Christian concert. Christian bands that smoke (which a lot of them if not most of them do, including some of my players) have to duck into back alleys as to not offend anybody. I think smoking is stupid. But I think it’s stupid because it smells bad and it kills you. I don’t use my religion to judge other people about it.

Rather than just being honest about where we are at and what we all struggle with though, we look to our gatekeepers to believe and live morally vicariously for us. That way we feel better about being part of the system of good, and the moral brokenness in our own lives is repressed like the fear of a child with her security blanket.

This sort of dishonesty is at the heart of much of what I and so many others find so repulsive about much of modern American Christendom

2. It kills creativity

I had a conversation with John Mark McMillan last night about something that I think is very interesting. By the way, I consider John Mark to be one of the ones I consider to be making a valiant effort in transcending some of these imposed limitations in this industry. But he mentioned to me how strange it is that people keep calling his new album “creative.” That word is actually one of the most used words when people describe our music as well. In fact, I bet some of you reading this have described as such. Here’s the weird thing about this…
Why do you find it necessary to say that?

Do you notice that nobody really uses that word about other types of music? I just was perusing some Itunes user reviews to see if this holds up. I checked John Mark and mine, and “creativity” is very often found. But it’s not often found in reviews of bands like Sigur Ros, Bon Iver, Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens or other artists who are certainly very “creative.”

Nobody goes to an art gallery and says, “boy, that painting is so creative.” Why? Because it’s art! Of course it’s creative! Why else would it be there? It’s very nature is creativity. Or like Lisa pointed out to me today, “that would be like saying, I love your house, it’s so architectural.”

But when someone in the Christian industry actually takes their art seriously, everybody is like “holy crap, listen to how creative it is!”
It’s like a person that’s been living among zombies for years seeing an actual human being and exclaiming, “wow, look at how clean her face is! She doesn’t even have any blood on it or anything!”

I’m not slamming the people that describe our music as creative. I appreciate the kindness that’s behind the words, but it does make me sad that the idea of creativity is so foreign to our industry that we have to actually point it out when someone actually sees the art as art and not zombie propaganda. Ok, that might have been a little much. But I like the sentence so I’ll leave it.

So that’s why I’m good at the Christian or secular game. I’ve seen behind the curtain, and I know the little man that’s pulling the levers, and he’s not impressive. I recognize his voice at this point, and it’s all over religious media.

Why am I writing this blog?

Some of you have commented in the past when I’ve been critical of the Christian music industry that I’m being hypocritical by still being a part of it. I don’t see it that way. I actually love a lot of the individual people in the industry. There really are some amazing people in it, many of who share my weariness about the way things have been. And I also love you guys. I love our fans. I love the people that we get to meet and I love being able to get our music to them. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try our best to purify the systems that we are part of. I just want to be honest about what I see and call us to find better ways of doing things.

Two quick recommendations and I’ll stop this blog that has already gone on WAY too long:

Consumers: I would suggest that you actively support those artists that you love that the industry hasn’t necessarily bought into. The cards are stacked against people that actually want to do honest creative art in this industry, and the people that try really need your direct help and support to have any chance. For us, we’ve had one guy for instance that has been sending us a check every month for years because he appreciates what we are trying to do. Do you know how much that one family has helped us stay encouraged? Even if it’s not a huge amount of money or anything, just having people behind you in this sort of battle is really helpful.

Industry people: Stop being so afraid. I know you want things to be different than they are as well. I know you want creativity to be valued as much as “Becky” analysis, but we need some of you to have some balls and make some decisions based on that value system. Yes money matters. But so does beauty. Art actually makes a difference in the world. Have the courage to actually make decisions on values and not simply on past numbers and trends. And for crying out loud, if it really is good, the numbers will follow eventually anyway.

Artists: Take heart. I think the tides may be turning. The recent attention and success of our band speaks to it I think. People are growing weary of the status quo. The machine and its sheen have seen its strongest days. So I encourage you as well to not be afraid. Your art is worth making even if the industry around you isn’t quite ready for it yet. Make it and let them catch up with you. Your art is sacred. Be honest. Be brave. And don’t let the markets or the industry be the final filter on your art, let your heart do that. Ok that’s all from me tonight.