Lubbock Lights 2018 is tonight in the Allen Theatre, featuring famous Lubbock musicians, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Amanda Shires and Lloyd Maines. Jo Moore, director of the Texas Tech Presidential Lecture and Performance Series, visits with the Front Row to share more about the event.
Tell us a little bit about what began Lubbock Lights.
Lubbock Lights is something that we started four years ago and what we wanted to do was to put on a concert series that not only presented music to the community, that celebrated the musical heritage of the South Plains, but that also talked about the creative process and creativity and how people come up with songs that they come up with. And we thought, what better way to do that than to concentrate on some of our Lubbock musicians who are just so outstanding, which all came years ago with Buddy Holly—of course world acclaim.
We have some incredible alternative country folk, Americana roots music, that’s come out of our region…Tonight we’re going to end that trilogy of the Flatlanders with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Lloyd Maines—he’s always our kingpin, he’s our foundation, our keystone if you will—he is our record producer extraordinaire, then Amanda Shires, who is this young incredibly talented fiddler.
You talked about the creative process, what did you mean by that?
You may recall, and we did talk about it on your show, when we had Lyle Lovett, that opened our Presidential Lecture and Performance Series, and a lot of that was a conversation with Lyle Lovett about his music, about how he comes up with not only the melodies but the lyrics, what ideas is he prompted to write about. There was a lot about creative process going around right now. Creativity is not just, in my view, I’m a painter, or I’m a pianist, or I’m a composer, or I’m a song writer. We all, if you really tap into it are creative thinkers in some form or fashion…in this regard we’re going to be talking to these musicians about what inspires them.
Listen to the full interview at the top of the article.
