The songwriter and author Mary Gauthier writes:
A song waiting to be born has something to teach the songwriter. Something we didn’t know before we wrote it.” (Gauthier 2021, 00:04:50)
Gauthier also states:
(…) don’t leave music and song up to professionals. It’s available to all people who feel pulled and called to it, and it has something in it that the human spirit really needs. It is mysterious and mystical, and it is beyond words, it is a language in and of itself. (…) Little kids write songs all the time. (…) It is available to way more people than we are aware of (Gauthier 2021, 07:15:50)
She furthermore contends that:
A song can change a heart, a changed heart has the power to change a mind. And when a mind changes, a person changes. When people change, the world changes. One song, one heart, one mind, one person at a time. Songs can bring a deeper understanding of each other and ourselves, and open the heart to love. (Gauthier 2021, 00:06:50)
The songwriter and author Clive Ridgway argues that:
Great songs and great stories have one powerful characteristic in common, they carry the subliminal message that we are all in this together. (…) songs, like well written stories, carry shared experiences that connect us to one another. In the process they conscientize, humanize and transform. They open up our minds, they open up our hearts (…) It is about the human connection (Ridgway 2022, 105)
The songwriter and author Nick Cave says:
So thank God, literally, for music, because it’s one of the last remaining places, beyond raw nature, that people can feel awed by something happening in real time, that feeling of reverence and wonder (…) These are sacred moments (Cave, O’Hagan, 2022)
We take inspiration from these insights,
and are led by their underpinnings philosophically,
in the Declaration of Songs of Our Interdependence (SOI).