“The natural world around us is not just the backdrop of our lives. It’s a very real character in our story – one that has been around much longer than we have. It’s worth paying some attention to it, even now, when everything looks so bleak.”

“I’ve experienced all of that, and Scripture backs those descriptions as by-products of walking with Jesus. Once you’ve seen stuff like that, it’s hard to keep it to yourself. It’s kinda like this: When you have tasted Pancho’s cheese dip, you can’t not tell other people about it when they come to our city.”

It never looks great on paper, but you can always be guaranteed that great stuff will happen. Like a magisterial Jill Scott cracking jokes and dispensing love advice, Sturgill Simpson surprising with a lacerating, hard country-soul set or that time that a nervy Randy Newman surveyed the afternoon crowd and began playing an unedited version of “Rednecks.”