Jon Batiste: You don’t need me to tell you. He has an incredible amount of style, gift, imagination, skill, depth, playfulness. 

I’m inspired by the amount of time he must put in to practice and honing his abilities, but think also of the deep love and joy that guides him. Every interview with him is chock full of beautiful summations of living well. He knows his core values, and his voice flows out of those values. For example, during Covidtide he said, “we have to come together and meet it with integrity, love, and responsibility.”

Jon Batiste’s lyrics to Don’t Stop:

Don’t stop dreaming, don’t stop believing

‘Cause you know our time is coming up

So with all you’ve got, don’t stop

There’s a reason that you’re here, don’t stop

You ain’t got nothing to fear, so don’t stop

This train has left the station

Who knows what destination

This love is for the taking, don’t stop

The persistence of “Don’t Stop” put me in mind of two other artists that I knew nothing about prior to this week. I’m weirdly ignorant of a lot of music.

A classroom visit with Drew Holcomb captured as a podcast was full of stories of inspiration and perspiration. Drew describes a point when he was ready to just finish out his commitments for the year and then hang it up. Of course, that didn’t happen, because during that year things turned around and became sustainable. But it wasn’t that something radically changed, it was just the power of not stopping.

Coincidently, The Well of Sound, a podcast that does deep dives and career retrospectives, reposted their very first show this week on Mott the Hoople.

Mott the Hoople put their story as a band into their final single – (Do You Remember) The Saturday Gigs. Side note: Don’t you just love songs titles that start with parentheses?

It is hard to get the full effect of this lyric from just reading it; I recommend the podcast so you can hear Dave Zahl give it the commentary it deserves. But, what’s pertinent here, are these four lines:

In ’72 we was born to lose
We slipped down snakes into yesterday’s news
I was ready to quit
But then we went to Croydon

They didn’t stop, they stuck with it long enough to get to Croydon. What’s your Croydon? What’s mine?

“This train has left the station / who knows the destination”