KINDNESS AS A WHISPER IN A SYSTEM THAT SCREAMS

Kindness today is often framed as an individual virtue. But in a system built on speed, visibility, and competition, gentleness risks becoming invisible. This conversation with Bruce Sudano is not about answers. It’s about what it means to hold onto kindness while existing inside a system that rarely rewards it.

"Better Angels" speaks about kindness at a time when aggression often feels louder than empathy. Do you think kindness has changed meaning across generations, or is it something that remains constant, even when culture shifts?

I believe kindness remains but it speaks much more softly. While aggression screams kindness is a whisper that goes unnoticed. I’m not sure whether there’s been a shift in the culture, maybe yes, but I believe the vast majority of people are kind. At the same time we need to be reminded because the pressure and stress of life these days can be intense and people are on edge so being kind may not be the first reaction. Kindness however, can be a healing balm.

You've lived through multiple cultural eras in music. What has stayed with you across time, and what have you consciously let go of as an artist?

Having lived through multiple eras in music what has stayed with me is the need to create and write songs reflecting where I am in life and where we are as a people. What I have let go of is the need to be number one and to compare myself to others. Now my only competition is myself, to be the best me I can be and to continue to get better at what I do.

Sudano calls kindness a whisper. But whispers don’t survive in systems built to reward noise. What doesn’t demand attention is treated as irrelevant. And relevance, today, is mistaken for value.

Today's music industry often moves at extreme speed. How do you personally define artistic permanence in a time that seems to reward immediacy?

I think artistic permanence is achieved through integrity and dedication to your craft on a consistent basis over time. Speed for an artist is related to a feeling the work is complete and at the same time there is a point of letting go, a point of diminishing return. Still, I would never release a song just to have something out. I have to believe in the song and feel it is worthy. A song like Better Angels is a piece inspired by this moment in the world  and immediacy is at play here, and because of how the music system is set up these days we have the ability to be immediate where in the past this was not the case. So the speed can be used for an advantage as long as the artistic side doesn’t suffer.

Integrity is often framed as timeless. But in fast systems, it becomes inefficient. Permanence doesn’t disappear, it just stops being rewarded.

In your words, kindness is not weakness but a human - and even spiritual - virtue. When did you first understand this: through life, or through music?

Understanding the virtue of kindness is something I learned as a child from my parents and through the teachings of the church. I do believe it is instilled in all of us at birth, a natural human gift that can be developed and fortified or distorted by circumstances of life. Music can play a part is all human emotions, love, anger, frustration etc. as well as kindness. Maybe it all begins with the nursery rhymes that parents sing to their children. They are sweet, loving and kind. This is our introduction to music.

Do you see kindness as a personal value, or as a cultural stance that can still be radical today?

Yes, both,  I see kindness as a personal value and also something that can be a cultural stance. Let’s make radical kindness the new revolution!

Radical kindness sounds revolutionary. Until it meets metrics, deadlines, and visibility economies. Revolutions don’t scare systems. Inconsistency does.

The artwork for "Better Angels" comes from a detail you photographed in Milan. What does Italy represent for you creatively, and how do places shape the emotional tone of your work?

I believe every city has a spirit that permeates it. For me Milan is a place of passion, motion and artistry. It allows me the space and atmosphere to be creative. It’s my favorite place to write. There are other cities where I’ve lived (New York, Nashville, Los Angeles) that have creative energy but they all have different drivers, motivations and conduits.

Looking back at your career, what do you hope listeners take with them - not from a single song, but from the body of work as a whole?

Looking back on my career I hope listeners take away a sense of truth, hope, of lessons learned, stories told that they see themselves in. I hope they get an understanding of who I am as a person, what I believed in and stood for, how I navigated loss, how deeply I love and the strength of the spirit that guides me.

Kindness, in this conversation, is never loud. It doesn’t demand space. It doesn’t trend. Sudano doesn’t frame kindness as a strategy, nor as branding. He treats it as something pre-existing the system — something learned before the system, before competition, before visibility. And that may be exactly the problem. Because contemporary cultural systems don’t eliminate kindness directly.

They simply make it inefficient. So it survives only in margins: in slower careers, in long bodies of work, in artists who have already let go of being “number one.” What Sudano describes is not nostalgia. It’s a different economy of value — one where permanence is built through integrity rather than exposure.

But integrity, today, is not neutral. It is a choice. And often, a loss. To choose kindness now is to accept that it may never be amplified. That it may never circulate widely.

The real question is whether we are willing to build cultural systems that don’t require it to scream in order to survive.