The Two Most Important Things For 2011

2011 is about hugeness and hope.

The last few years were a period of retraction, of hunkering down, shuttering up, riding it out.

2011 won't be about merely surviving, but thriving.

It won’t be enough to do little shows, to impact a couple people, to make your music in the dark, to sing for a few friends.

2011 will be about seeking out new audiences and eyeballs, it will be about sharing those things that are true, innovative, and beautiful.

The world is ready for hope on a large scale.

Heck it was ready in 2007 and 2008; however, the next couple years battered everyone down.

Using phrases such as hope became a liability, a sign of naivety.

However, if anything it only made the desire for hope even more sincere.

Therefore my mission in 2011, to borrow the words of Karen Blessen, is "To shine the light on what is timeless and full of hope, beauty and wisdom, to expose it and make it huge and heart changing for all who experience it."

In 2009 and 2010, it was acceptable to plan and produce small shows.

We needed that intimacy, the nose to nose connections.

In 2011, it will take more than that. It will take movements, thousands of people, scale.

2011 is the time that those underground art movements in Dallas, which I can personally trace back to 2003 but I am sure go much further (decades) than that, come bubbling to the surface.

It is the year of the grand alliance, where pockets of the scene unite and produce the things we could never do by ourselves.

We need joy more than ever. We need to know who our fellow travelers are. And we need the world to know that they are invited to journey with us, to join our quest for beauty, truth, personal fulfillment, hope, and joy.

And this is a movement for doctors and dentists. Bankers and receptionists. Software engineers and mechanics. Socialites and plumbers. Hackers and athletes. From Beaumont to Boston to Baghdad.

The things that unite us will always be stronger than things that divide us.

And in 2011 we will put the goodness of people on full display, magnify it, capture imaginations, inject hope, heal hearts and change lives.

Because the key to making it huge and hopeful in 2011 isn’t the number of people who come, but the number of people you impact.

2011 is the year of the bang, not the whimper.