Join me for this free, 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about our country’s complexities, possibilities, and limitations from some of our greatest creative artists.
I’m Alan Light, music journalist and author, and I invite you to join me for my upcoming class, Five Things I’ve Learned About America – from Five American Musicians.
As we’ll explore during this free, 90-minute session, my career has given me the opportunity to work with and think about many of the giants of American music, and to learn from them about music as a way to think about American culture, offering both great potential and constant reality checks about our history and our future.
For more than thirty years, I’ve been working as a writer, editor, and broadcaster concentrating on popular music of various genres. I have been a Senior Writer at Rolling Stone, the editor-in-chief of Vibe and Spin magazines, and a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. I’ve written numerous books, worked on several documentary films (winning an Emmy Award along the way), and spent many years hosting a music-talk show on SiriusXM. In college, I was an American Studies major, and themes and thoughts about the relationships between our country and its music are never far from my mind.
I’m very happy to say that I’ll be joined in conversation during this session by my friend, Resolute Square’s Megan Matson. Together, we’ll look closely at five artists I have written about and spent time with over the years, and at the lessons they offer about power, commerce, and creativity.
Please join me and Megan as we discuss how:
- Nina Simone showed us that any part of American music is always more complicated than it seems;
- Johnny Cash demonstrated the creative power of an open mind, a generous heart, and genuine empathy;
- Prince revealed the potential and the conflicts between genius, commerce, and technology;
- Public Enemy illustrated the possibilities and the limitations of activism in American music; and
- Taylor Swift proves that consensus is still in our grasp, through authenticity and strategy.
I hope that you can be part of this Five Things I’ve Learned about America class. I hope, too, that you’ll explore others in this complimentary series.
In the face of the challenges America faces today, I believe that the ideals these musicians represent—their ambitions and achievements—offer both the opportunity to better understand each other and some models for continuing to move forward, as listeners and as citizens.
Please join me!
– Alan Light
Megan Matson has the somewhat frenetic bio of someone who starts and/or makes things happen.
Most recently, Megan got the pro-democracy media platform ResoluteSquare.com structured, capitalized and launched, where you can find writings, podcasts and streaming shows edited by Lisa Senecal and anchored by Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens, Joe Trippi and 35 other expert contributors, against the autocratic MAGA media.
Megan first came to her climate infrastructure work at Table Rock (energy, water, tech & democracy investing) through political organizing. The grassroots group she started (Mainstreet Moms Organize or Bust) did Adopt-a-Swing-State, the first voter registration letter-writing in the country. Megan and MMOB then helped get California’s first CCA (Marin Clean Energy) launched, a green local utility model that replicated to serve now 15 million California ratepayers. Megan was also field director on the defeat of PG&E’s $65M anti-CCA statewide ballot initiative, and co-launched LEAN Energy, a trade group supporting the formation of CCAs nationally today.
In political work, Megan was very active on The Lincoln Project board from late 2021; trained a team to co-launch the SeeSay2020 election incidents heat map on ESRI’s ArcGIS with Democracy Labs’ Deepak Puri; and in 2018, moved to Texas to work for the Field Team on Beto O’Rourke’s Senate race. Over that same stretch of years, Megan and her equity partner Peter Luchetti backed, grew and sold Heila Technologies, a clean energy microgrid controller; and are now backing and growing Scepter Air, a geotech climate emissions company now flying stratospheric balloons over the Permian Basin. The two partners capitalized and now run the first labor-owned P3 in the country, a water-and-wastewater utility serving 110,000 in Southern California. There Megan headed up a $32M progressive-design-build wastewater plant construction, a waste-based clean energy microgrid plan, and was a presenter and convener on P3 for President Obama’s Build America initiatives in D.C.
Megan is an English Major from Yale, and lives in Bolinas, California with her family and too many animals. Like most everyone, Megan can be found writing sporadically on Substack, at https://meganmatson.substack.com/
About Resolute Square
Resolute Square is a pro-democracy media company that is taking the fight beyond the ballot box to where the autocrats are winning–the media landscape of America. Launched just after the 2022 midterms, Resolute Square is growing into a powerful media voice dedicated to crushing the enemies of democracy like Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, OANN, Fox News, and on and on.
Over the past year, we've introduced a range of engaging podcasts and streaming shows. These include Rick Wilson’s The Enemies List, Joe Trippi’s That Trippi Show, and the Strategy Session streaming show with Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens, and Joe Trippi. Tune in every Tuesday at 7 PM ET for insightful discussions and analysis.
The platform amplifies the voices of democracy heroes like Simon Rosenberg, Jennifer Mercieca, David Pepper, Gevin Reynolds, Teri Kanefield, and Juliet Jeske, host of Decoding Fox News.
You can subscribe for free to Resolute Square and sign up for a special three-part conversation with Rick, Stuart, and Joe on the media’s failures in rising to this critical moment in our nation's history—one that will determine our future.
You and a guest could win two tickets to the class of your choice.