A couple of years ago, I heard about the plight of Daniel Elder, a composer of sacred music who was blacklisted by his peers, not to mention the entire music publishing industry for one single Instagram post.

The setting was the summer of 2020, which if you recall was a quite dark place generally speaking all over the world. When Covid wasn't dominating the headlines, racism was the topic of the day. The George Floyd incident had just occurred in Minneapolis, and what seemed like the apocalypse was literally happening all over the U.S.

Daniel lived just down the road from the courthouse in Nashville, TN which was being looted and burned, and he sent out a post - which was later deleted - basically saying there might just be a better way to voice one's disapproval of racism than burning down courthouses. This one post created a huge rift within the artistic community - you know, those that are historically the most open-minded and resistant to Groupthink among the populace. He was banned, deplatformed, essentially lost his ability to make a living with his compositions.

I wanted to reach out to Daniel to interview him on my show (which at the time was a musician-themed show) to get his thoughts. He didn't want to do a voice interview, but he said he would do an interview via email - which suited me just fine.

At any rate, I republished the interview, as well as some of my own comments on the Gone Newclear podcast yesterday. I think it's worth a listen, but you know, I'm biased like that.

Here's the link: https://jamesdnewcomb.com/singers