Last night I got to be part of the audience, doing something like this

Jacob Collier is an extraordinary musician who does not do what he is told, or what others before him have done¹.

A few years ago he started experimenting with asking his audience to sing a note, then conducting them in a multi-part harmony, just by pointing at them. It’s quite something².

Bringing People Together

When so much about our public life is awful, and terrifying, and despair-inducing, it can be tempting to think that taking time out for moments of joy is somehow trivial or disrespectful.

It’s not. It’s essential.

Bringing people from all walks of life together to experience something—collectively, as at a concert or asynchronously, as with reading a good story—is important work.

It’s important that you write your stories.

It’s important that you make them good enough to share. 

Because sometimes, when people come together and share a moment of joy—singing in unexpected harmony or sharing their love of a sarcastic security cyborg—it reminds them of how alike we all are.

Bad actors try to assemble their followers into a scared, exclusionary huddle.

It only takes one courageous person’s vision to bring people together for good.

Art matters. 

Stories matter.

Your voice matters.

Keep writing,

Julie

P. S. It can be hard to gather the motivation to do the work in the face of, well, everything. Here’s a brand-new workbook to help you reconnect to your practice or your project. Download it now, as a thank you for following along on this writing journey with me!

1. Which doesn’t mean he’s a contrarian. His commitment to doing what he does, how he likes it, has led him to friendship with Quincy Jones, and a deal with Martin guitars where they produced a 5-string guitar for him, because he thought ‘why does a guitar have to have six strings?” ↩︎
2. I’ve been in choirs where we could not sing acapella and stay in tune. Last night, he led thousands of people through a long improvised harmonic thing and then brought back in an actual orchestra…and we were still on pitch! ↩︎