Maybe nurturing an audience is the wrong term. Good music will find the ears that want to hear it, if we give it a chance. We need to stop “protecting” people from good music.

BTW Lucas clarified that he hoped the Kimmel audience would dig C. Scott. I think I misread his intention a bit, not that that changes anything I wrote.

“It is not our job as musicians to guess what people want to hear, it is our job to make the music that we hear, and do it honestly.”

I wish I could be as optimistic in general when it comes to the idea of good music nurturing audiences. (Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I am — sometimes even excessively so.) It’s hard to avoid being influenced by whatever microcosm of the music industry I happen to be inhabiting on a particular day.

I guess the bigger point is that audiences are never monolithic, and that sometimes they come to the table with ears open to change, and sometimes they don’t. And when media people go into the relationship with the assumption that audiences should never be challenged, that can become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just riffing here, but I really like what you wrote.