Quote of the Week...from Beck

I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.          ---Beck

Beck Hansen, or simply "Beck" as he is better known for decades, has been one of my favorite recording artists. Based originally in the Los Angeles area, he combined technical acoustic wizardry in the studio with offhand and sometimes off-base lyrics in many of his earlier songs like Loser, Deadweight and Novacane.  He has long said that anything goes with his music, and it reflects his fearless experimentation, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.  His above quote struck me not for its specific application to his craft, but rather because it has universal relevance in everything we do. There is a substantial difference between immature childish petulance and the wide-eyed innocent wonder children have about life and the world around them...it's the second of these qualities I extoll. I also think that a large part of both what Jesus preached and today's mindfulness movement direct us to return to that early mind state of our lives and become more rooted in the present and in what is immediately around us instead of obsessing on past regrets or future worries and struggling through the morass of abstraction and overthinking.  The greatest music has those childlike elements of simplicity and repetition, whether it's a Beethoven symphony or a funny Beck track...the greatest of anything goes the same way, in my opinion...