Our story

In 2003, we were touring the country as folksingers, playing in coffeehouses, churches, and house concerts. One day we ran into our friend Mike Tilley, who worked at the local community radio station, and he said, “You guys should think about doing a radio show, maybe a short segment about what it’s like to be musicians on the road.” It sounded like a nice idea—particularly since I (John) had produced and hosted a program on a college radio station a few years back. Life went on and we never acted on it. Six months later we received a call from Mike, and he asked if we had thought about his idea of doing a radio show. We said that we were interested. He said, “Well, you need to put a proposal together because one of our programs was canceled, and we’re looking to fill the slot.” Hmmm, we thought, opportunity rarely knocks twice, and maybe we should do this. “Okay, we’ll think about it,” we said to Mike, to which he said, “You better think fast, because the program committee meets in one hour.” We bounced a few ideas around and called back with our proposal to do a one-hour music-and-interview program about songwriting. The program director agreed to give us one hour once a month.

So it began. We started Art of the Song by interviewing all the songwriters we knew. We broadened our horizons by attending folk festivals and music conferences, interviewing the performers there. As we interviewed more and more songwriters, we noticed that most of them spoke very passionately about their process—almost as a kind of spiritual experience. We realized that many of the concepts they were talking about were universal and could be applied to other forms of artistic expression, such as painting, writing, and dancing, as well as to everyday creative acts like cooking a meal and raising a family.

With insatiable curiosity, we started reading every book we could get our hands on that had anything to do with creativity. We discovered other authors, including Paul Ray, Julia Cameron, Daniel Pink, Matthew Fox, Richard Florida, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Sir Ken Robinson—to name a few. We were pleasantly surprised by the number of books available on the subject of creativity. What we learned was very encouraging with regard to audience development. We learned that everyone has the capacity to be creative; it is one of the things that separates humans from other living beings. We also learned that many people didn’t particularly think of themselves as creative, that there was a persistent delusion that creativity is just for artists, musicians, writers, and dancers—the gifted ones. We discovered that engaging in a creative activity has many beneficial effects with regard to health and well-being, both for the individual and for society as a whole, and that there is a relationship between creativity and spirituality. In addition, we learned that there are many ways creativity can be put to good use in business, and that cities with a strong culture of creativity reap substantial economic rewards.

Thus, our mission was born: Through talking with songwriters and other creative people we inspire listeners to express themselves creatively, and we dispel the myth that some people are not creative.

We reached our goal of fifty stations the first year, and now Art of the Song is on more than 200 stations. Our strong foundation of 250,000 weekly listeners is a diverse group with various means of expressing themselves creatively. We’re tapping into an ever-growing community of professional and “everyday” creatives, proving that creativity is an important topic that has broad interest.