For the Crate Diggers.

There's a through-line that connects Art Blakey to Sharon Jones to Durand Jones & The Indications, and once you hear it you can't unhear it. It's the sound of music played with conviction — warm, groove-forward, human in a way that no amount of production polish can manufacture.

That's the music that has always grabbed me hardest: soul, funk, blues, jazz, and the places where they bleed into each other. Classic rock gave me the vocabulary early on, but the deeper I listened the more I understood that it was all pointing back to the same source — feeling first, everything else second.

Writing about music is an attempt to describe that feeling precisely enough to be useful to someone else. Not to rank or gatekeep, but to say: here is what this does, here is why it matters, here is what you might be missing. The artists I come back to most — the Sharon Joneses, the Gary Clark Juniors, the Kelly Finnigans, the ones making soul music like it's the most important thing in the world right now — don't always get the column inches they deserve. That's what mojolists.com is for.