Katie & Solomon
The Information Age (Part One) comes out this Friday, 9/4! In celebration, each day this week I’m going to share a loving social media post about the people who helped bring it into the world. Today is all about the powerhouse team of Katie & Solomon. I interviewed them for Audiode 37 so you can hear them in their own words there.
They bought a vast, old, cold building in Arcata, CA and turned it into a community arts center. They call it The Sanctuary. I have played there enough to know to bring my winter coat from Minnesota. It gets cold in there. Which is a wonderful counterpoint to the warmth that it generates.
How many lives have been enriched by the creation of such a place? How many projects have been born? All because Katie & Solomon created this sanctuary and continue to do the hard work of stewardship in their kind, patient, and sometimes surprisingly strict way.
One of the projects they made possible is my new album. They invited me to participate in their artist-in-residence program and the timing was perfect. I went up there and set up shop for a month at the end of the year. They were wonderful facilitators of creation. Each morning, I would get high on coffee and we’d talk until it was time to get going. I carried the energy of whatever we had discussed into my work. This album is fully born of that place and that time with those people. I felt free to create without judgement and it just kept flowing. That is the gift that they gave me -- the time and space to simply create. I will be forever grateful.
The most lasting impression from that experience is this: the act of creation itself is the central sacred duty of an artist. There are so many distractions. It is enough to somehow return to the childlike joy of bringing something new into the world. It’s real and it’s magic and it matters. In the spirit of what Katie & Solomon gave to me, I will rededicate myself to fostering this ethos of creativity in the world and encouraging it in other people. Let’s go for it. Let’s get to work. Let’s get a little weird. Let’s make a new world together, one project at a time.
