🤟 Mr. Rogers is the best inspiration! No wonder you are a kind soul. 🥰 Your music is beautiful, healing, and a balm for our weary minds. ❤
3 months ago | 0
Mr Rogers! Yes. His music director, Johnny Costa was an improv machine on the piano. As adults, my friends and I would tune in to the end credits to listen to those improved outros. Just magical. You do that, brother. I live in New Orleans and we love you.
3 months ago | 1
🤟 Saw you and heard your speech at the Brown University graduation. Best day of my life 😇 You are a gift to humanity
3 months ago | 1
Love your music -got to know you on Colbert -love Soul! 🦋🙌
3 months ago | 4
I absorbed LON E LE ave on a Fri night 7pm Western North Carolina, Asheville. “I’m Casper the friendly ghost” a much love stuffed wonder from my childhood 1960s Jim Henson walks in me
3 months ago | 1
With you ALL the way, brother. Keep the faith. Keep your mind strong. Stay in the light. I know you do. 🤟
3 months ago | 2
Jon Batiste
LONELY AVENUE my new song and short film is out now, featuring the icon Randy Newman. He is a master poet, piano wizard, and sharp observer of the irony and absurdity of all human things. As a late teen when I charted my musical development towards songwriting, Randy, Stevie Wonder, Bill Withers and Mr Rogers were some of my key inspirations. It was appropriate that we first met each other over a decade ago in DC lobbying for songwriters rights on the hill. We've both had the pleasure of scoring Pixar films ( maybe we'd score one together one day?) and we had crossed paths a few times since Washington. After not seeing him for some years, I decided to cold call him. I'm the king of the cold call btw-we might not speak for like seven years and then I'll call you out the blue everyday for a season. We bonded over the last year or more which eventually led to LONELY AVENUE, captured at his house around the piano. One take no rehearsal, in the tradition of blues storytelling.
We share many musical connections, but the most significant is the mutuality of our indebtedness to Ray Charles. Ray was an outlier who hasn't gotten mentioned enough in this recent era of reclaiming country music. He was also one of the pioneers of translating
gospel, blues and black American roots music to the world without diluting it in any way at all!
What's deep is both Ray and Randy existing in the culture the way they do proves the it's all Americana, from the same source. When writing the BIG MONEY album I wanted to build on the tradition of this kind of music making in popular culture. Our cultural inheritance is important in a times like this when we seem to have forgotten who we are.
We are in a loneliness epidemic. Loneliness is a symptom of lacking identity and having no place in the world. May LONELY AVENUE be a force of good in your life. Amen. Courtesy of Ray, Randy and Me. Drop a 🤟 if you're with me
3 months ago | [YT] | 611