Politics & Power Quote by Terri Windling

Terri Windling’s tastes read like a passport stamped in older worlds: Celtic folk, Native American traditions, “early music” - genres that carry the audible grain of place, ritual, and lineage. She’s signaling an aesthetic allegiance to music that feels rooted rather than manufactured, communal rather than spotlight-hungry. For an artist, that’s not just a playlist; it’s a statement about where inspiration comes from: the long memory, the handmade, the mythic.

Then she drops the punchline: “except for Show Tunes.” The joke lands because it’s so disproportionate to the preceding openness. “There isn’t a lot of music that I don’t like” sets up a generous persona, someone porous to influence. The exception snaps that generosity into a boundary, and the boundary is telling. Show tunes are theatrical by design: they foreground performance, plot mechanics, and emotional signaling at full volume. For someone drawn to music that suggests rather than announces, show tunes can feel like being instructed what to feel and when to clap.

The subtext isn’t simply “musicals bad.” It’s a mild suspicion of art that wears its intentions on its sequined sleeve. Windling’s list frames music as cultural ecology; “show tunes” represent a different ecosystem entirely - commercial, stage-lit, engineered for legibility. The humor keeps it from becoming a manifesto, but the intent is clear: she values music that retains mystery, texture, and a sense of lived time, not music that arrives pre-packaged with jazz hands and a curtain call.