Hosts
Imagine A World is hosted by Willie Thompson, left, and Taylor Goss, right. Photo by Micaela Go.
Taylor Goss (2021 cohort), from Lacassine, Louisiana, is pursuing an MA in music, science, and technology and an MPP in public policy at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. He graduated with college honors from Louisiana State University with bachelor's degrees in music and entrepreneurship. Taylor aspires to connect musicians and policymakers, using the arts to communicate societal needs and provoke policy change.
Willie Thompson (2022 cohort), from Griffin, Georgia, is pursuing a master's degree in business administration at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He graduatedsumma cum laudefrom Morehouse College with a bachelor’s degree in economics and a minor in Chinese Studies. He intends to create and contribute to organizations using the arts as a conduit for community building and intercultural education.
Imagine A World's theme music was composed and recorded by Taylor Goss. The podcast was originally conceived and led by Briana Mullen (2020 cohort), Taylor Goss, and Willie Thompson, along with Daniel Gajardo (2020 cohort) and Jordan Conger (2020 cohort).
Special thanks toSanaa Alam,Rachel Desch,Sydney Hunt,Chan Leem,Kara Schechtman,and Rahul Thapa.
Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
Taylor Goss:
And my parents, one thing, I love talking about this, they would bring me to dive bars in Lake Charles at midnight and make a deal with the owner like, "Okay, the kid can be there, as long as his parents are there." So I could go into these 21 and up shows, sit in with the band, and they would stay out till, sometimes, 1:00 or 2:00 am with me, so I could sit in and experience this musical life, and that I could be mentored by these people who were really kind to me in the community. All these Lake Charles music folks were incredible to me. And through them, and the feeling that music is community, music teaches leadership skills, that was when it changed into a lifelong pursuit.
I'm Taylor Goss. I'm a member of the 2021 Knight-Hennessy cohort and a third-year student in a Master of Arts in Music, Science, and Technology, and a Master of Arts in Public Policy. I imagine a world where music and art are recognized and funded, not only as means of emotional expression, but also as drivers of social change.
Welcome to the Imagine A World podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars. We are here to give you a glimpse into the Knight-Hennessy Scholar community of graduate students, spanning all seven Stanford schools, including business, education, engineering, humanities, law, medicine, and sustainability. In each episode, we talk with scholars about the world they imagine and what they are doing to bring it to life.
Willie Thompson:
Today you'll be hearing from... Wait, hold on. Let me check my notes. Oh, Taylor Goss, a join MPP/MA in music, science, and technology student. During our conversation, you'll hear Taylor's experience growing up in a tiny Louisiana town with an outsize impact, connecting art to social change, friends and family mailbag, and so much more.
Hey, what's up y'all? Welcome to another episode of the Imagine A World podcast. I am your cohost, Willie Thompson. I'm at the business school, will be at the ed school. Member of the 2022 cohort of Knight-Hennessy. And, as always, I am joined by my amazing, phenomenal cohost, who actually will not be cohosting today. Isn't that right, Taylor?
Taylor Goss:
Oh, plot twist. What?
Willie Thompson:
Yeah. We're going to have Taylor on the episode and he's going to be the guest, and not the host. But I'm not doing this by myself. I'm not doing this alone.
Taylor Goss:
No, never.
Willie Thompson:
Never. I was going to sing Michael Jackson's "You Are Not Alone," but I feel like we'd get sued for that, right? Or not sued, we'd have to pay royalties, right?
Taylor Goss:
It's not fair use for you to just sing it for an uneducational, non-parody reason.
Willie Thompson:
Okay. Fair enough. Anyway, we have two other members of the Imagine a World team. We have Sydney Hunt.
Sydney Hunt:
Woo. Hey, hey. I'm Sydney. I am a member of the 2023 cohort and you've heard me on a couple episodes before. I'm doing a PhD in Electrical Engineering here at Stanford.
Willie Thompson:
That's great, and we have additional support here in our second cohost. Yes, we have two cohosts today. And actually, I won't even do the introduction, I'll let him introduce himself. Go for it.
Raul Tahpa:
Sounds good. Hey, this is Raul. Raul Tahpa. I'm a member of the 2023 cohort, and this is my first time on the episode, so please be a little kind to me.
Sydney Hunt:
No, you're going to do awesome.
Willie Thompson:
No.
Raul Tahpa:
Yeah, but I'm really excited to interrogate Taylor.
Taylor Goss:
Interrogate? Oh, god.
Raul Tahpa:
Yeah. You'll be hearing some tough questions from me. But I'm doing my PhD in Biomedical Science and excited to be here.
Willie Thompson:
Biomedical science.
Taylor Goss:
I'm happy you're here.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah. We're all happy you're here.
Taylor Goss:
I'm happy both of y'all are here. Hell, I'm happy all of y'all are here.
Willie Thompson:
Hey, it's a very STEM... well, I guess the STEM folks are sitting on that side of the table. They're sitting across from us right now, which is crazy. So we've already said that Taylor is a different kind of guest today. He's been a part of this process and experience from the genesis, and before we even get into the Imagine A World statement, which is so on brand for you, by the way, just want to check in. I mean, at the time of this recording, we're a couple weeks before spring quarter ends. We are a couple of weeks away from you completing with a KH.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, that is true. Completing.
Willie Thompson:
Completing. And you're also a couple weeks from finishing at Stanford and moving to LA, so just how are you feeling right now?
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, it feels strange to say and mean a couple rather than a few. When you say a few, that feels comfortable. A couple is worrying.
Willie Thompson:
Two.
Taylor Goss:
Two.
Willie Thompson:
If you want to feel more anxiety. Two.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, two.
Willie Thompson:
You have two weeks.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, yeah.
Willie Thompson:
Less than two weeks.
Taylor Goss:
No, I feel good. I was actually just talking with another Knight-Hennessy Scholar about this upstairs. I ran into Elliot Reichardt. And I was saying that I really feel the sand slipping through the hourglass. It's been-
Sydney Hunt:
So poetic.
Taylor Goss:
It's been three years and it feels like there full and really great years, and I'm grateful for that, but there's also a little bit of a bittersweet angle, because I really love my people that I have here, as I'm sure is evident from anyone who's listened to this podcast. And I like what I've found in the Bay Area, but at the same time, I'm also very excited for what lies ahead, which we'll go into at some point today, but I feel good. I'm making a lot of music right now, I'm savoring the time that I have left here, and I'm spending a lot of time with folks that I love, and my life is just so fundamentally good right now, and I'm pretty happy, so yeah.
Sydney Hunt:
Yay.
Taylor Goss:
In a good spot.
Sydney Hunt:
That's awesome. And we have two guitars here today.
Taylor Goss:
We do.
Sydney Hunt:
Not one, but two. So maybe we'll make some music on this-
Taylor Goss:
Not a few, but a couple-
Sydney Hunt:
... episode
Taylor Goss:
... guitars.
Sydney Hunt:
Yeah. Not a few-
Willie Thompson:
Yeah. Two guitars.
Sydney Hunt:
... but a couple.
Willie Thompson:
Like two weeks.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, yeah.
Willie Thompson:
Well, cool. Look, you talked about where you're going, but let's talk about where you're from.
Taylor Goss:
Okay.
Sydney Hunt:
Yes. Taylor Goss. The Taylor Goss. The famous-
Taylor Goss:
Oh, hardly.
Sydney Hunt:
... Taylor Goss. What's your origin story, man? Where are you from and what was your journey to get here?
Taylor Goss:
Well, it all started with this radioactive spider.
Willie Thompson:
Oh my gosh.
Taylor Goss:
Okay, so I grew up in a little bitty town called Lacassine, Louisiana.
Willie Thompson:
Lacassine.
Taylor Goss:
I grew up in Lacassine, Louisiana. I'm not going to stop this accent for the rest of the podcast. So Lacassine is in southwest Louisiana. It's about 30 minutes east of the city of Lake Charles. I was born in a hospital in Lake Charles. We're going way back to the beginning. But I grew up in this little bitty town, which, to give you a picture, my home was surrounded by a pasture, the population of the town is about 500 people, give or take. And until I was about 10 years old, the road in front of my house was unpaved. It was a gravel road and many roads around where I grew up are gravel roads, but now it's blacktop, got paved eventually, which resulted in a much cleaner car for us a lot of the time.
Willie Thompson:
I bet.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, but I grew up, primarily, with my parents and my sister. I have one younger sister. I have three older siblings, Ashley, Derek, and Chad, all of whom are 10 years or more older than me, and I love those people so much, and they have children of their own and are all still around Louisiana, but were just about graduating high school when I was becoming a sentient, moving human being. So I really grew up with my younger sister. She's two years younger than me. Her name is Heather.
My dad's name is Sam Goss. My mom's name is Joani Goss. My dad was an operator at an oil refinery in Westlake, which is close to Lake Charles. Many people in Louisiana work in the oil and gas industry. He retired in 2021, the year that I graduated college. Up until then, he worked for 30 years in that position. My mom is a naturopathic physician. She has a doctorate in naturopathic medicine that she got in Portland, Oregon.
Willie Thompson:
And what is naturopathic medicine?
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, so naturopathic medicine, essentially, involved non-Western and alternative remedies. So-
Raul Tahpa:
It is similar to the Ayurvedic medicine in the East?
Taylor Goss:
I think that there are connections. I'm not a practitioner myself, so I don't know how connected they are, but I know that it's a lot of non-Western medical traditions. And, in general, this holistic approach to lifestyle change to effect health overall. So my mom had a small, but dedicated, private practice that she ran out of her home, and she still has a smaller group of patients that she sees frequently, but she doesn't see as many patients as when I was growing up. But she also was raising me and my sister at home, and she was my primary educator and my sister's primary educator, because I was homeschooled from the first grade until I graduated high school.
Sydney Hunt:
Wow.
Raul Tahpa:
Whoa.
Sydney Hunt:
I didn't know this.
Raul Tahpa:
That's news.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Sydney Hunt:
What?
Taylor Goss:
So the story with that, and I'll say it briefly, is that we had a fairly underfunded and fairly under-resourced K through 12 school in Lacassine and there's lot of lovely people that I know who had a great experience in that school and they've gone on to be lovely people with great lives. It just wasn't quite the right experience for me, at the time, and my parents saw this and decided that they could provide me more opportunities and a wider world than Lacassine had to offer.
And so, they took my out of school and decided to try out homeschooling and, in a nutshell, my mom did a very good job in teaching me and my sister how to learn, and a lot of it was very collaborative and self-guided. And especially, by the time I get to middle school, high school, a lot of the classes are fairly self-directed. And then, eventually, I start taking dual enrollment high school courses at the local university in Lake Charles, McNeese University. Go Pokes.
So homeschooling was a pretty alternative choice, but it ended up being really beautiful for me, because it allowed this sort of self-guided, self-determined education, still rigorous, still by state standards. But it also allowed me to complete my coursework to the best of my ability, and then use whatever time I had left for whatever passion project I was pursuing at the time, which eventually became music and guitar playing. So yeah, that was my early life was my parents and I and my sister in this little town, homeschooling, and making a lot of trips to Lake Charles, because I became very involved with music and with a youth leadership group called 4-H, which is a national thing.
Willie Thompson:
Oh, yeah, man. 4-H.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, man. Head, heart, hands, health.
Willie Thompson:
There it is.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. I pledge my head to clear thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands for larger service, and my health to better living, for my club, my community, my country, and my world.
Willie Thompson:
You remember much more about 4-H than I do, growing up and having 4-H, so that's impressive.
Taylor Goss:
I was pretty involved, I and my sister. In a situation, we were homeschooling, we weren't around our peers-
Willie Thompson:
Oh, interesting.
Taylor Goss:
... most of the day, but my parents were very cognizant and were like, "We want to provide a homeschooling experience which is fruitful for our social lives, as well."
Sydney Hunt:
Yes.
Taylor Goss:
And so, we had friends and we had hangs and we had projects in Lake Charles mostly, because music and 4-H were centered around there. So four or five days out of the week, towards the end of high school, we were up in Lake Charles. I met a lot of people along the way who really cultivated a love music.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah, because I feel like there's a core memory you've mentioned in previous episodes around the first time you heard guitar and saw guitar, so I'd be interested in talking a little bit about that. And then, maybe we can talk about LSU and those Tigers and how you ended up becoming a different bird, a different animal-
Taylor Goss:
A different animal.
Willie Thompson:
... altogether.
Taylor Goss:
Okay, yeah. Let's do it.
Willie Thompson:
A cardinal or a tree, whichever one-
Sydney Hunt:
Tree.
Willie Thompson:
... fits you.
Taylor Goss:
A different organism.
Willie Thompson:
Which, by the way, Stanford, a tree's not intimidating. Go Trees. I'm just like this-
Sydney Hunt:
Fear the tree. The t-shirts.
Taylor Goss:
Fear the tree.
Sydney Hunt:
Gosh.
Taylor Goss:
Okay, yeah. There is a core memory there. So I remember not really having a deep personal connection with music growing up. It would be on the radio, and I do have some really core memories of being in my dad's truck, riding around the dirt roads around where we lived and listening to country music radio. I'm talking Brooks & Dunn, I'm talking The Chicks, I'm talking Shania Twain. And so, I have childhood connections with that, but at the time I didn't feel it as, "Oh, this is something that I'm going to pursue. This is something I love." But in some movie or some commercial, I don't know what it was, I heard "Hey, Jude," by The Beatles.
Sydney Hunt:
Oh, I love that song. Yeah.
Taylor Goss:
And it sort of blew my mind, and I was at an age where I had the interest and the facility to go online and research what this was that I was hearing, and I went down such a rabbit hole. Oh my god. I downloaded an app where I could download Wikipedia pages and just downloaded every article about The Beatles and all their records and The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Cream and The Allman Brothers Band, and that was a catapult into the world of music for me, and I very quickly wanted to learn guitar. And funnily enough, I wanted the video game Rock Band, where you have the plastic guitar?
Willie Thompson:
Rock Band or Guitar Hero?
Taylor Goss:
Rock Band, because The Beatles had a version of Rock Band that they released where it was only Beatles songs, with all-
Willie Thompson:
Oh, interesting.
Taylor Goss:
... these cool 3D graphics and I remember pleading to my mom, "Can I please have this Christmas?," or whatever, and she's like, "Honey, I love you, but no. If you're going to do this, then you need to just play the guitar."
Sydney Hunt:
Ah, I like that answer.
Taylor Goss:
And so, I can credit my mom.
Willie Thompson:
She upgraded your ideas.
Taylor Goss:
I can credit my mom and my dad for being like, "No, we're not going to get you that. If you want to do something like this, you're just going to play guitar." So on my 13th birthday, I used my birthday money at a pawn shop in Lake Charles and I went and picked up a sunburst electric guitar that I thought looked like Eric Clapton's, and I was off to the races. I spent the next couple weeks just shedding the intro do Johnny B. Goode, the Chuck Berry song. If you've ever seen Back to the Future, it's the one Marty McFly plays at the end, and I thought that was sick as hell.
And so, I learned that, and one day my dad walks into our back office where I was practicing guitar and he stands there for a minute, he's about to leave for work, and he says, "Hey, that sounds pretty good," and that blew my mind and I was like, "Okay, well, I'm going to keep doing this, for sure." And it was just a snowball effect from there. I didn't have lessons, I went online and found guitar tabs and instructional videos and I taught myself using the internet.
Raul Tahpa:
Did anyone in your family play guitar?
Taylor Goss:
That's a great question. I had a family member in my extended family who played guitar at church, occasionally, but I maybe sat down with him once and talked about guitar, but it was not an extended instruction. There weren't many people in my immediate family that were really into music. My mom has a beautiful voice, my sister has a beautiful voice, my dad does not sing, but they're all music lovers.
Raul Tahpa:
I see.
Taylor Goss:
But it was really, instructionally, educationally, it was me going online and seeking it out, at least for about a year. And then, interestingly enough, within a year, I found this rock band summer program like, "Hey, get your kids to this theater in Lake Charles and we'll put them together in a band and teach them some rock and roll songs," and I thought that sounded like the coolest thing ever. And I'll be honest, at the time, I was a very sort of shy and introverted person.
Willie Thompson:
Really?
Taylor Goss:
Surprisingly. I think a lot of people that know me now would be very surprised to hear that, but I really was. I dealt with a lot of anxiety growing up. That social anxiety was something that, as a result of working through it, and my mom in particular and my family were very supportive about it, and really helped me to sort of move through what, at the time, was a fear of losing people that were close to me, to the point where I would have sort of panic episodes.
And it was a rough time, but through going through that experience, I think I was able to come out the other side much more at peace with, I think, the fleeting nature of the relationships we have, but also the importance of those relationships. And I think I just came out less afraid, in general, and a little bit more comfortable with myself and a little bit more confident, and I think I worked through things that I maybe wouldn't have worked through, if I hadn't had that experience with anxiety.
So that's something that comes up a lot in my life now, that I'm happy to be able to talk about, because it was central for a long time, but it something that I know how to deal with now. And, at the time, I was a much more introverted and kind of shy person, so I was excited about making this music, but I also was a little bit reticent of going to Lake Charles for several days in a row and just hanging out with all these new people, but I pretty much immediately took to it, and I met a couple of people who remain very important in my life.
The director of that program, there were two directors, one of them, Marcus Johnson, who's still in Lake Charles and is one of my most consistent and beloved mentors. He's a dear friend and someone who he showed me The Meters, which is one of the greatest funk bands to ever come out of Louisiana, and even if it were that alone that he gifted me, he would be an extremely influential person in my life. But he's given me so much more, and from the very beginning he's just been this extremely compassionate and thoughtful and caring music educator and great musician himself. He's a great guitar player, and he directed that program, along with colleague Doug Gay, who's in Baton Rouge, and is also a dearly beloved friend. Those two guys are very important in my life.
I remember the very first day that I started this program, there was a drummer, his name is Sam DeSantos, he's in Philly now, and we both love Led Zeppelin, we came to find out very quickly. And so, on lunch breaks, we would scarf down our sandwiches and then go to the stage and just drill Led Zeppelin songs-
Willie Thompson:
Oh, that's so-
Taylor Goss:
... just over and over.
Willie Thompson:
... fun.
Taylor Goss:
We kind of find like, "Oh, my people." So the transition from teaching myself guitar to playing with the band was really what catapulted me into, "Oh, this might be something I can do longer term," and unlocked that passion for music.
Raul Tahpa:
What's your favorite Led Zeppelin song?
Taylor Goss:
What's my favorite Led Zeppelin song? That's such a hard question, my dude. I'm going to give you a deep cut Led Zeppelin song, a slightly deeper cut Led Zeppelin song, and maybe there are some that might be more universally loved, but there's a record from 1975 called Physical Graffiti. It's a double record and there's lots of great stuff on it, but one of my favorite tracks is a track called Ten Years Gone. It's very beloved among the Led Zeppelin fandom, but not one of their hits, and it is one of the best examples of Jimmy Page's guitar army approach, just layering over layering over layering of guitars, and it's pretty epic. So yeah, Ten Years Gone, Led Zeppelin. Check that out. I do love providing music recommendations.
Willie Thompson:
Who needs Spotify when you have Taylor Goss?
Taylor Goss:
There you go. You got your AI DJ right here.
Raul Tahpa:
So you talked about you being homeschooled and being self-taught in music. So can you tell us more about your transition from being homeschooled to college?
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. Yeah, I remember feeling like I was academically prepared. I, as I mentioned, took a bunch of dual enrollment college courses toward the end of high school, and so I would drive from Lacassine, Louisiana 30 minutes to town, we call it, "to town," to go to Lake Charles to go to the university, and I would go to class with college students, many of whom did not know I was a high school student.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah. Did you have a beard then or no?
Taylor Goss:
No, I didn't have a beard. No, I didn't have a beard. I did have the long hair though, and I had the beginning of sideburns, which was a deeply unfortunate-
Sydney Hunt:
Oh my goodness.
Taylor Goss:
... choice. But yeah, so I went to these classes and I think that it helped me, because it proved to me that I could hang academically, having come from this nontraditional academic background. And then, also, it sort of put me back in a rhythm of being around a bunch of people who were my peers, much more consistently every day, as opposed to event based, going to Lake Charles for a gig or something. And doing the McNeese dual enrollment stuff and one summer that I spent in Boston, Massachusetts doing a five-week program at the Berklee College of Music.
Sydney Hunt:
Oh, yeah.
Willie Thompson:
Oh, cool.
Taylor Goss:
An amazing program in Lake Charles called Jazz In The Arts gave me a scholarship to go to Boston and attend this program for five weeks, and it was really great, and I came out realizing that I didn't want to go to music school or I didn't want to go to a school that only taught music.
Sydney Hunt:
Because?
Willie Thompson:
Why was that?
Sydney Hunt:
Yeah, why?
Taylor Goss:
Because I felt that so many folks up there are incredible and amazing, there's many people who do great through Berklee, but I wanted something more out of my college experience, in that I wanted to be surrounded by people who did different things than me. I wanted to have a great musician community, but I also wanted to meet folks who were studying something radically different, and at a place like Berklee, you're just going to, necessarily, be around more people who want to make music their life, which is lovely, and it was also incredibly expensive.
Sydney Hunt:
Yeah, god.
Willie Thompson:
So two things in response to that, one is it sounded like you wanted an interdisciplinary experience.
Taylor Goss:
That's right.
Willie Thompson:
Which makes sense why you're also a Knight-Hennessy. And the second is that I would like to venture and assume, as someone that's also from the deep south, that the scholarship opportunities for your state school, like an LSU or UGA or Georgia Tech are much more abundant than an out-of-state Berklee School of Music.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, man. Yeah. You're absolutely correct, and the way that manifested with me was that I and my mom were, together, sort of going through this college admissions process, the modern college admissions Common App process that-
Willie Thompson:
Man.
Sydney Hunt:
Oh, gosh.
Taylor Goss:
Wow, I never thought the word Common App would leave my lips again... that neither of us had found before. My mom helped me, logistically, find people to be advised by and answer questions, but she very much gave me the space and the freedom to craft my application. There was no helicopter parent thing. She has always facilitated my interests and my passions without compelling me to do the things that I was interested in.
Sydney Hunt:
Sure. So you finished with a B.A. in music and entrepreneurship, was that what you went in-
Taylor Goss:
Well, yeah. So in this space where I was looking at scholarships, understanding options and what I was going to study, I wanted to study music, but I wanted to make sure that I had something that would allow me to sustain myself, so I wanted to do a business degree and I wanted to do a music degree. That was the plan at the time, but to answer Willie's question, McNeese and LSU, Louisiana State University, the flagship university of Louisiana, go Tigers. Hey, man. Both offered really considerable scholarship packages, which, if I had gone out of state, I would have been paying so much more, and my family did not have the ability to pay that.
I was paying my own way, whatever I was going to be doing. So I did throw a couple of moon shots out there, I did Brown and Harvard, and got wait listed, but also understood that there was really something special about the opportunities offered by the LSU experience in particular, especially when this life changing scholarship was offered to me called the Stamps Scholarship. It's a family.
Sydney Hunt:
Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Taylor Goss:
The Stamps family. This incredibly generous endowment by them at multiple public universities, state public universities across The United States. It's a full cost of enrollment scholarship, and I was asked to apply for the scholarship and was interviewed and, insanely, was offered a spot at LSU under the Stamps Scholarship. And so, it was really a no-brainer, at that point, because very quickly LSU went from, "Okay, is this staying close?" It has this reputation of being a southern football party school.
And then, through the recruitment process of the LSU Ogden Honors College and the Stamps Scholarship, they really rolled out the red carpet and showed that LSU is this land grant, sea grant, space grant, research-oriented university with all these incredible opportunities, and sort of this smaller, more focused, sort of liberal arts university experience within the honors college. That, within the larger 35,000 student body, sort of best of both worlds, so it became my top choice over the course of a weekend, the interview weekend.
And so, so much was riding on this and I was just blown away to be offered this, so it was a no-brainer, and I did follow through and I decided to do the music degree, because at some point along the way, I remember talking to my mom one day, we had gone to see a Led Zeppelin concert film that was screening in Baton Rouge and we walked out and I said, "You know what? I don't need to be a rockstar. I don't want to be famous, but I could make music for the rest of my life." I was just so inspired by that. And from then on my parents were like, "Okay, if this is what you want to do, be smart about it, but we fully support you."
Sydney Hunt:
Yeah. Do you think there was a transition point to... I want to bounce off of making music for life, that music, for you, transitioned from happiness to fulfillment? Was there ever a moment where it went from-
Taylor Goss:
That's a-
Sydney Hunt:
... temporary joy to lasting joy?
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, because I think there's some immediate gratification with mastering a skill, but when music became so entangled with community for me, that's when it became a lifelong pursuit. Part of that was joining the band, and that summer camp that I was talking about became a yearlong thing. Marcus Johnson, my guy, was the director for this program, and I was part of the flagship band for this youth rock and roll afterschool program, essentially, called Young Band Nation. Check it out. Southwest Louisiana Music Studios is the name of the company now.
So once I made close friends and started encountering mentors in the community, because there were all these people in the Lake Charles music scene that saw me play guitar and were like, "Oh, this kid's really interested, and there's something there. Do you want to come sit in with our band? Do you want to talk about a life in music? Can I hire you for this gig, to come play this wedding?," or whatever. And it started giving me these opportunities not just to play, but to hang and understand the lifestyle and, I will say, to their credit, my parents were fully on board with this. Did not try to hide any of the short... there are pitfalls one can fall to in a life of musicianship, drugs and alcohol.
Willie Thompson:
Well documented.
Taylor Goss:
Well documented.
Willie Thompson:
The pitfalls. Yes.
Taylor Goss:
Well documented. And so, they were like, "Yeah, read Greg Allman's autobiography. Read interviews with these folks who've come out on the other side and found that it's not really that romantic to be Keith Richards." And then, I was hanging out with musicians and my parents, one thing, I love talking about this, they would bring me to dive bars in Lake Charles at midnight and make a deal with the owner like, "Okay, the kid can be there, as long as his parents are there." So I could go into these 21 and up shows, sit in with the band, and they would stay out till, sometimes, 1:00 or 2:00 am with me, so I could sit in and experience this musical life.
Sydney Hunt:
Wow.
Taylor Goss:
And that I could be mentored by these people who are really kind to me in the community. So a mix of those mentors, Mickey Smith comes to mind, the Daigle family who ran that Jazz In The Arts program, Marcus Johnson, Justin Martindale, Paul Gonsoulin, Michael Krajicek. I'll send this to them and they'll hear their names, all these Lake Charles music folks were incredible to me, and through them and the feeling that music is community, music teaches leadership skills, that was when it changed into a lifelong pursuit.
Raul Tahpa:
Following up on that, talking about the music and community, you were also engaged with Coastal Voices.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. Yeah, man.
Raul Tahpa:
Would love to talk more about it. What inspired you to be part of that and tell us more about the Coastal Voices.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. Okay, so there's a couple of things. So I mentioned the LSU Ogden Honors College, it was a home for me within LSU. Dr. Granger Babco*ck, Ms. Cindy Seghers, Miles Garrett, Dean Jonathan Earle. These are all people who were instrumental in making LSU a home for me. They were staff and faculty at the honors college. And something I did at the honors college was the Louisiana Service and Leadership program, which Dr. Babco*ck and Ms. Cindy Seghers co-led, and it was a program focused on poverty and coastal wetlands loss in Louisiana, and we took classes and attended lectures and engaged in this little community of LASAL Scholars that were focused on these two issues and other issues of social justice within Louisiana.
And I credit that program with making me understand Louisiana better, both the good things about it and the bad things about it. Because of LASAL, I left LSU loving Louisiana for its failings and for its amazing culture and food and people and music. But within LASAL, one thing they encourage you to do is pursue projects that are related to your work, and I wanted to do something that was a fusion between policy messaging and music. And Madelyn Smith, who's still a dear friend, was another LASAL scholar who started working on a project called Coastal Voices, and it was, in essence, an oral history documentation project, which documented the human experience of coastal wetlands loss.
So what does it mean to work for the US Army Corps of Engineers and work with the levee system? What does it mean to be a shrimper? What does it mean to have your home on land which is rapidly decaying and have to move to a different place? All of this coastal wetlands loss is discussed so often, in terms of ecology and in terms of economics, and this was a look into the human impact.
So Madelyn brought me onto this project, which was directed by Dr. Michael Pasquier, who's still a bud to this day. And Madelyn and Dr. Pasquier told me, "Okay, so you know we're looking for some music for the podcast. Could you make us three minutes of intro music?" And I did it, and I came back and they're like, "Oh, we love this. Could you just make a soundtrack for the entire podcast?"
Sydney Hunt:
Wow.
Taylor Goss:
So in the way that Radiolab or podcasts like that will have music throughout, sort of building the narrative, that's what I did. Like a soundtrack is for the film, I did a soundtrack for this podcast.
Sydney Hunt:
I love that.
Taylor Goss:
Music flowing throughout, and it was a total baptism by fire. I had never composed anything this long. I went into a studio room and just improvised guitar until I found something that I liked, and then layered on top of that, listening to the interviews. I made trips to coastal Louisiana, where these people were being interviewed, and took field recordings, just put microphones up to grass or waters, and then incorporated that into the music or helped inspire the music. I was really trying for it to be this holistic experience of music that is people's voices, that is inspired by the land and by the stories of people on the land, and having it be as much of the narrative as the interviews were, without overwhelming.
And Coastal Voices, I put so much time and effort into it and found such incredible mentorship with Madelyn and Dr. Pasquier, in particular. And they really let me run wild with it. And also, I should say, Dr. Jesse Allison was an advisor within the electronic music and digital media program that facilitated my work on Coastal Voices. So yeah, it was the first time that I really felt, "Oh, public policy messaging and music and the arts can come together to create this sort of experience that sheds some human light and emotionality on a kind of cold concept."
Sydney Hunt:
Yeah. I love that, I love that. And I feel like you've been able to keep that train going now at Knight-Hennessy. You have the music, you have the public policy, and you have the pod.
Willie Thompson:
And the pod-
Taylor Goss:
And the pod.
Willie Thompson:
... yeah.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. My life has been inundated with podcasts ever since then.
Sydney Hunt:
Yeah, it is. So what has Stanford been like for you? What has Knight-Hennessy been like for you? You're in, I think, an interesting spot where we're getting to interview you, literally, two weeks before you finish this journey, so tell us about whatever you want to share about, now, life on the West Coast.
Willie Thompson:
And we'll note that you do the music for this podcast, too.
Sydney Hunt:
Yes.
Willie Thompson:
I don't think we've ever talked about that on an episode, but the music you hear for the podcast is actually a Goss original.
Taylor Goss:
It was. Well, first of all, the transition to Stanford was a point where I was very worried. I had reached the end of LSU, a beautiful experience where I made so many friends and had a deep, deep community. The folks that I lived with off campus, for instance, we still have a group chat to this day that we'll send stuff in and we deeply love each other. And so, I have a huge and abundant community from LSU. It was the right place and the right time, and I could not have had a better experience there.
Willie Thompson:
You also had a national championship, too. So, yeah.
Taylor Goss:
We also had a 2019 national championship. That's right.
Raul Tahpa:
Did you? In what?
Taylor Goss:
The LSU Tigers won the-
Willie Thompson:
For football.
Taylor Goss:
Football, yeah.
Willie Thompson:
Joe Burrow.
Taylor Goss:
Joe Burrow, yeah. Man, Joe Burrow-
Willie Thompson:
Who's friends with Jack Harlow.
Taylor Goss:
... Ja'Marr Chase. Well, once you reach a certain level, everyone's friends with Jack Harlow. Yeah, we had that national championship, so it was this socially transformative experience where I think, I mentioned I was a sort of shy, introverted person, I became much more chill and confident in myself as time went on, and comfortable. And academically, learned so much about music making and music theory, and realized I had this dual interest in politics and policy and music, and I decided, "I think what I need, to discern what I'm going to do next, is to continue my education."
And at the time, I thought, "Oh, I haven't really trained as much in public policy. If I want to potentially live a life in this, I need to study that. I don't need to study music as much, because that's something I do every day." I was gigging a lot. I played guitar with a lot of bands, while I was at LSU.
Willie Thompson:
You still gig now.
Taylor Goss:
Still gig now. Yeah, still have gigs in San Francisco. That's been a consistent thing. But so I applied to all these public policy programs, and I applied to the Rhodes Scholarship and the Truman Scholarship and Knight-Hennessy. Dr. Drew Arms is an angel of a woman, who's a dean at the Ogden Honors College now, but at the time, she was the director of office of fellowships and she said to me, "I think that, whether or not you think you're right for them, you should apply for these fellowships." And she, and a bunch of other people that I mentioned before, were the bedrock that allowed me to put myself on paper for these fellowships. Because I want to acknowledge, it's a hard thing to present a version of yourself on paper that will be scrutinized by an admissions committee.
Sydney Hunt:
Ever single work you write.
Taylor Goss:
Every single word. And it required a lot of soul-searching for me. And it makes me thing of people who are interested in applying to Knight Hennessy, for instance. For me, I allowed myself to search my soul and really make it more about the process than about the result. Dr. Arms was very good at emphasizing that. And so, I just figured out what do I want to do and how can I tell a story about what I want to do that suggests a path that might work, and that's maybe one core thing that I would say to people considering Knight-Hennessy, is that the path that you lay down in your application doesn't have to be set in stone.
Sydney Hunt:
Yes, agreed.
Taylor Goss:
I think that it should be accurate, it should be representational, it should be conveying your passion, and it should be something that you really believe in. But at the end of the day, our roads all lead different ways, and I think my path towards a fusion of music and public policy action, I still do not know what that exactly is going to look like. But I was able to write about why those things are important to me, and present a story, a path that I also knew might not be the final word on things.
Sydney Hunt:
Sure. Does that story relate to your Imagine A World statement?
Taylor Goss:
It does, yeah.
Sydney Hunt:
And can you repeat it-
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, it does.
Sydney Hunt:
... for everyone-
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, so the-
Sydney Hunt:
... just so-
Willie Thompson:
Yeah, let him talk about that.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, so my Imagine A World statement sort of revolves around a world which recognizes music and the arts as a valid contributor to social change.
Willie Thompson:
Well, and that's so interesting, because I feel like there are so many people that you could look at who have done that in their lives, in their roles, and it crosses types of art. Ai Weiwei, Faith Ringgold, Nina Simone.
Taylor Goss:
Amen, yeah.
Willie Thompson:
Shamsia Hassani. And so, there is a tradition there, but your Imagine A World statement almost evokes this image of people knowing it's reality, but the reality hasn't yet fully existed in a way that's sustainable or-
Taylor Goss:
Or maybe recognized by the policy community.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah. That feels right to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Taylor Goss:
I think-
Willie Thompson:
It's a reality, but it hasn't been recognized.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, and it's recognized in the sense that, as you cited, there are so many examples of social change being catalyzed or being fueled by song, by chants, by art, and it becomes part of the story of a movement. And there's so much evidence for that, but year after year, there are debates on whether we should fund the arts in schools. And there are assumptions about what fields of study are more socially valued, and there's maybe not as strong connections between the policymaking community and the arts community as there could be, and it's a delicate balance, right? Because maybe the most obvious example of, let's say, collusion between the arts and policy is propaganda. Propaganda can be good, propaganda can be bad, but we think about it, a lot, as bad or malicious or manipulative in some way.
But I'm thinking of art which is representative of reality, which takes a human experience and advocates for it and communicates it in a way which sheds light on the human impact. Like I was talking about Coastal Voices, it's sort of the classic stepping inside someone else's shoes. That's never possible, really, to step inside someone else's shoes, but we can understand a shadow of someone else's human experience through the emotionality of music or visual art or things like that, and that's why I think it's important, and that's why I just think whatever state, whatever view the world has of it, it's probably not enough, in terms of giving music and the arts the recognition, in terms of funding, in terms of social value, as a driver of social change.
You can go to americansforthearts.com and find so many examples of the economic driving nature of music, the correlations between art and music making and educational attainment. These are all things that are known, but at the end of the day, I think society could always better understand both the emotional value of music and the social value of music and the arts.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah. That makes a ton of sense, and I will say, when you were even telling the story of Coastal Voices, you mentioned the ecological and the economic aspects of that work, and the third element of that work, you called it the human element, but to me it felt like the emotional element, right? Because even if I can't reach 100% empathy, I can probably know what it's like to feel an emotion that people are feeling, right? And so, that feels like it's the third leg of that stool, of how do you build something that combines all these observable realities, right? Like people needing to move, people needing to adjust where they live with what it feels inside of themselves to do that, and how do you-
Taylor Goss:
Yes, yeah, because there are-
Willie Thompson:
... pull that out?
Taylor Goss:
... people out there that will argue specifically about coastal wetlands loss. About like, "Oh, well sea level's rising? Coast is going? We'll just move people inland. Sell your house and move inland." Okay, who are you going to sell your house to? Where are you going to go? So yes, there's a coldness or there's an apathy about that experience, specifically, that I think can be better understood through the emotional medium-
Willie Thompson:
Absolutely.
Taylor Goss:
... of art.
Willie Thompson:
This is probably the last question we'll ask on this piece, and then we'll go to something new for the listeners, the thing that's of interest, especially, is your Imagine A World statement talking about the importance of funding. You actually explicitly state funding. And so, given where you've been at Stanford, doing your master's in public policy, also doing a lot of work in sound technology, music and technology rather, what is the ideal state for you? What does a better world look like for you, with regards to that?
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. The US has a very private funded organization of arts funding. I think there is room for more public funding of the arts, especially when it comes to education or at least prioritization. I think what the educational system, when it comes to art and arts funding... the average child in the US, having access to a robust arts education, the sort of transformative arts education that Briana Mullen talked about on her episode, the sort that can give students a passion project, whether or not they choose to pursue music or not. Music is a beautiful thing to take part in. So yes, the average availability and quality of arts education in the US would be what I mean when I say funding priority.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah. And so, what I'm hearing in that is what feels ideal and what would look ideal is if every child... we'll use America as an example, if every child in The United States of America has a fluency and an ability to engage with music or the arts-
Taylor Goss:
Or the arts, absolutely.
Willie Thompson:
... in a way-
Taylor Goss:
That's a great way-
Willie Thompson:
... that we're-
Taylor Goss:
... to say it. Yeah.
Willie Thompson:
... expected to have fluency in English, right? Or fluency in biology or science. These are things that should be valued. And that makes a ton of sense and actually reminds of my high school band director, Mr. Lukat, who used to always... as someone who went to formal public school, everything you were interested in almost had to feel like, "Oh, am I going to major in this in college?," and so that became the funnel through which you saw all the stuff you were interested in. So when I was in AP Music Theory and we're learning about circle of fourths, circle of fifths or something, learning about modes and doing jazz music theory and all this other stuff, power chords and everything, you start thinking, "Oh, this is interesting. Should this be my major?"
And Mr. Lukat would always say, "My goal, as your band director, is to pique your interest in music. If none of you go on to become music majors or band directors, I'm totally fine with that." Right? And I feel like even having him say that was really impactful and just level set the fact that we were building an experience that we could lean on, and not a credential that we needed to use to navigate the world. So you saying that elicited that memory for me, so I appreciate you sharing that.
Taylor Goss:
I love that. Yeah, of course. And I think, implicit in everything that you're saying and connected to something that we were talking about earlier, while all that is happening, while the knowledge is being gained, while the interest is being piqued, you're also engaging in a community the entire time, a very special and very specific community and that aspect of it should also be as valued as possible.
Sydney Hunt:
Yeah. All right, Taylor, so we've talked a lot about how you're involved in a bunch of different things, right? Music and policy. And some people, perhaps, might argue that these things don't really fit together, right? They're kind of two, I guess, independent experiences, but what have you done at Stanford to bring those two together?
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. I think I've, by and large, on campus, experienced them as fairly separate fields of study that have occasionally come to be interconnected. I wanted to study both, and I indicated my interest in applying to a public policy program, in addition to a music program on my initial application, but that's because of my overall interest in the intersection between the arts and public policy, policy communication, the humanization of public policy issues.
The first half of my studies at Stanford have been at The Center for Computer Research for Music and Acoustics or CCRMA, which funnily enough, is right up the street from Denning House. So my little hub around campus is Denning House, Lake Lagunita, and this big mansion that used to be a president's mansion that houses the CCRMA or CCRMA, for short, we call it CCRMA.
And there is where I've done my Music, Science, and Technology degree, which has been everything from digital signal processing, borderline electrical engineering, some music cognition and perception research study kind of stuff, and then a little bit of music programming or sound coding, all of these creating the ability for a student in the MA-MST program to understand a wide berth of what music technology has to offer, in terms of career and in terms of creative pursuits. And so, I had never studied anything close to electrical engineering or signal processing, so it was like being thrown into a-
Sydney Hunt:
Yeah, it's hard stuff.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, yeah, and I would talk to other EE students, friends of mine who were actual EE students, and I'd be like, "Yeah, I'm taking this class on Fourier transforms."
Sydney Hunt:
Gosh.
Taylor Goss:
They're like, "What?" Because it's this fairly complicated thing. But I had so many people who had come from stronger backgrounds in terms of physics or electrical engineering or things like that, who have been so supportive in the community at CCRMA, I've felt that I've been able to be who I am, which is a person who is... I'm a guitar player, I'm a songwriter, I'm a person that enjoys working in the recording studio, and more than anything, loves the creative process, and loves music technology for its ability to realize creative ideas, maybe even more than the core pursuit of music tech for music tech's sake.
And there are people who have a similar philosophy and there are folks who just love coding and who are extremely skilled at signal processing and making plug-ins, which later, down the road, allow artists to realize their vision. But I felt challenged to take on all these different avenues of music making that I hadn't seen before, but I never felt like I couldn't be myself and be like the guitar player, singer/songwriter guy and be that part of the community. So that's been an extremely eye-opening world of music and music technology to be exposed to, and a really beautiful community.
On the other side, has been this public policy world, where I took classes on economic research and international diplomacy and the political process in The United States, and an actual practicum where I, and a team of folks, studied the distribution of homeless housing, of supportive housing for homeless folks in Santa Clara County, a professional pursuit of public policy research. And this was something, as I mentioned before, I was interested in college, but this was the most intense series of studies that I'd had in the public policy field.
And I feel so much more grounded in what it means to be a practitioner of public policy, and the skills necessary, and the different career paths that might come from that. And I really feel strongly that this public policy interest and this commitment to service through avenues of public policymaking and distribution and communication, that is something that will always stick with me and that I am very excited to see how it pans out in my life.
Sydney Hunt:
So I guess on the topic of what you're going to do after, what are you going to do after graduating?
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, so I've had a lot of really fortuitous experiences in the California music space. I played in a bunch of bands back in Louisiana, and I continued to do that when I moved out to the Bay Area. I play with this great band called The Fourth Position, and we-
Sydney Hunt:
Cool.
Taylor Goss:
... play midnight to 3:30 at these little clubs, like the Boom Boom Room in San Francisco and that was a great way to keep my chops up and exercise that part of my life. And in the midst of that, I have started visited LA a little bit and I had a series of crazy serendipitous experiences of going to LA, meeting musical heroes of mine, who were very gracious in their offering of knowledge and offering to connect me with certain people, and that led to me doing an internship at a couple of studios in LA last summer, in the summer of 2023. Yeah, summer of 2023.
And I was so enamored with the community that I found out there, because they're musicians that I have admired from afar for many years, even as a kid back in Louisiana, and I just was lucky enough and in the right place at the right time and with the competency to do good work in spaces where musicians that I deeply admire are making their art, and I got to learn from them and sort of befriend a few of them. And so, now I feel like I have this support system and community within music and recording studios in Los Angeles and it's definitely a part of my life that I have dreamed that would look something like that.
My ability to go enter the recording studio world and hone my technical knowledge of recording engineering, which even at CCRMA, I've worked a lot in CCRMA's recording studio making work with other people, producing folks, engineering for folks, and gaining that skill set, going out to LA and finding, "Oh, I can actually do this at a competent level," was extremely exciting. So I got an offer to go work at a studio where I worked last summer in Malibu, California.
Sydney Hunt:
Beautiful.
Taylor Goss:
And so, I will be graduating in June, and then leaving in July to go live and work as a recording engineer-
Sydney Hunt:
Cool.
Taylor Goss:
... in Los Angeles, for the foreseeable future.
Sydney Hunt:
That's so awesome.
Raul Tahpa:
On a more fun note-
Taylor Goss:
Okay, okay. You haven't been having fun?
Raul Tahpa:
This whole conversation has been really fun, but I've been stalking you for some time now. I love your music, by the way.
Taylor Goss:
You've been stalking me for some time now? Oh, wow.
Raul Tahpa:
Yes. I watched your YouTube channel.
Taylor Goss:
This is a distressing thing to learn in a small room. You watched my YouTube channel. Okay.
Raul Tahpa:
I watched your YouTube channel. I watched-
Taylor Goss:
Oh, there's some stuff on there.
Raul Tahpa:
I watched your old music, as well, you're amazing, by the way.
Taylor Goss:
Aw, that's very sweet.
Raul Tahpa:
A lot of things have changed. Your guitars have changed.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, they have.
Raul Tahpa:
You grew a beard now.
Taylor Goss:
I grew a beard. I did.
Raul Tahpa:
You have gained some muscle, as well. One thing that hasn't changed-
Taylor Goss:
I mean, okay.
Raul Tahpa:
... is your hair.
Taylor Goss:
Is the hair. Okay.
Raul Tahpa:
What is the story of the hair?
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. That's so funny. The hair has changed in the sense that-
Willie Thompson:
Have you got muscle?
Taylor Goss:
No, not much. Not much.
Raul Tahpa:
He used to be skinny though.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, that was generous.
Raul Tahpa:
He used to be-
Taylor Goss:
I used to be skinnier, but it's still a generous observation. Yeah, my hair, at it's peak, was down to the small of my back.
Willie Thompson:
The small of your back?
Taylor Goss:
I mean, like that. Okay, down to my ass, Willie, that's what I'm trying to say. And-
Willie Thompson:
Who are you? A poet?
Taylor Goss:
So it used to be a lot longer, actually. Freshman year in college, I had the very long hair and sideburns combo, which, as I said before, was deeply unfortunate, which you can find on my Instagram, probably.
Willie Thompson:
Did that help your dating life at all?
Taylor Goss:
No.
Willie Thompson:
Okay, I just-
Taylor Goss:
Not at all. We don't need to get into that, though. But the origin story with the hair, I swear to God, one day I need a haircut and I've been playing music for a while, I kind of thought to myself, "Maybe I should grow my hair out a little bit longer. George Harrison had long hair, that's pretty cool." But I hadn't even voiced that, necessarily. One day I said to my dad, I was like, "Oh, we should get me a haircut one of these days, my hair's getting kind of long." And my dad said, "You know what? Just let it grow out a little. See how it looks."
And my dad is a bald man, and is not one to be like, "Yeah, hippie rager, grow out your hair." For some reason, he was like, "Yeah, grow it out and see how it looks," and I have not had my hair cut short ever since then, ever since that day.
Willie Thompson:
That's so interesting, and we'll get into our new segment in a second. It's interesting your dad told you to grow your hair, because my pops told me a different story when my brother and I-
Taylor Goss:
It's-
Willie Thompson:
... were trying to grow our our hair.
Taylor Goss:
I know, man.
Willie Thompson:
There might be a racial element to it.
Taylor Goss:
Sure, yeah.
Willie Thompson:
But we were trying to grow out our hair in middle school and our parents are like, "You can grow our your hair." We were like, "Oh, for real?" Like, "Yeah, grow out your hair. Let's see how you deal with it and keep it." And [inaudible 00:53:37], you know what I'm saying? It's crazy. And I remember, maybe a couple months later, my pops was like, "Yeah, well you're going to be bald before you're 20." And I'm like, "What? Bro, I'm 13. What do you mean I'm going to be bald before I'm 20?" But anyway, I found your dad telling you to just grow it out and see-
Taylor Goss:
I know.
Willie Thompson:
... very different juxtaposed to my experience.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, it was surprising to me, too, just because I think just traditional interactions between fathers and sons is more like what you're describing. And, as I said, my dad's bald and if I go bald, so be it, and that's okay. I hope that I retain the long hair, we're just going to have to see.
Willie Thompson:
I have faith in your follicles.
Taylor Goss:
Aw, thank you.
Sydney Hunt:
I think yeah, yeah.
Raul Tahpa:
Has it become part of your personality and would you ever consider cutting it?
Taylor Goss:
Oh, my hair is so much a part of my personal identity. I think people recognize me by it, at this point.
Willie Thompson:
100%.
Raul Tahpa:
I've always known you like that.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, and this is another thing that can be found on Instagram, but I ran for 4-H state office one time, and won, and-
Sydney Hunt:
Oh, snap.
Taylor Goss:
... my campaign poster was just an outline of my hair, so just a blank face with my hair, because it was my brand.
Willie Thompson:
I'm going on the Knight-Hennessy trip to Turkey in September, so I might just take a picture of you-
Taylor Goss:
Congrats.
Willie Thompson:
... and be like, "Give me the Taylor. I want you to give me the Taylor. That's what I want." But it's been a lot of fun. And folks, y'all have listened, at this point, to 19 episodes about how Knight-Hennessy's been helpful to folks and it has been helpful in so many ways. Taylor's been giving us some great advice. We want to do something a little different, as close out this episode and we're going to do some burning questions, so this is going to be rapid fire, Taylor, rapid fire. We're going to ask a ton of questions and you can only respond with a sentence. One sentence, that's all you got.
Sydney Hunt:
And no-
Taylor Goss:
Where'd you get-
Sydney Hunt:
... semicolons. No like-
Willie Thompson:
Yeah, no semicolons.
Taylor Goss:
You know this is hard for me. Brevity is not a gift I have.
Willie Thompson:
Subject, verb, predicate, period. Okay?
Taylor Goss:
No, I got it. I've diagrammed a few sentences in my day. I can do that.
Willie Thompson:
All right, here we go.
Taylor Goss:
Wait, are these from friends and family?
Willie Thompson:
These are from your friends and family, things that they submitted. I'll pass it off to Sydney to get us started.
Sydney Hunt:
Yes, okay.
Taylor Goss:
Can you tell me who it is after I answer?
Sydney Hunt:
Yes, of course, of course. Actually, one question we already got answered from Matt, your friend, said, "Have you ever considered cutting your hair? Why or why not?" So that one is great.
Taylor Goss:
He was one my roommates in college. He's lovely.
Sydney Hunt:
Cute, cute. Okay, well Matt Johnson, he says, in the question that says, "What's your relationship?" It says to Taylor, quote, "Best friend, official certified number one. I visited you the most this year."
Taylor Goss:
This is true. No, this is true. Yeah, yeah.
Sydney Hunt:
I'm-
Taylor Goss:
He came both in LA and here.
Sydney Hunt:
Oh, wow, wow. Beautiful. Okay, so this one I found so intriguing, and I feel like there's a little bit of tea behind it.
Taylor Goss:
Ooh.
Sydney Hunt:
It says, "Have you ever accidentally melted your roommate's colander while trying to steam broccoli?" One sentence, one sentence is all you get, Taylor.
Raul Tahpa:
What's it going to be?
Taylor Goss:
Yes.
Sydney Hunt:
Oh, wow. Okay.
Taylor Goss:
Yes, I did that.
Sydney Hunt:
Nice.
Taylor Goss:
Yes, I did that, comma, I am a dumbass.
Sydney Hunt:
No, that's okay. Okay, Raul, you're turn.
Raul Tahpa:
From the same guy, Matt Johnson, second question, "Are you a good cook? What's the favorite dish that you have ever made?"
Taylor Goss:
Oh, okay. He knows the answer to this. I'm a competent cook, and my favorite dish that I've ever made was a turkey for my sister's friends on Thanksgiving in college.
Sydney Hunt:
Nice.
Raul Tahpa:
Nice.
Willie Thompson:
Question number three. For a musician, what does failure look like?
Taylor Goss:
Wow. For me, failure as a musician, and in general, looks like a life devoid of community and devoid of music and devoid of service.
Sydney Hunt:
Nice, powerful. Okay, now we're going to go to a question from your mama.
Taylor Goss:
Aw.
Sydney Hunt:
She asks, "When you were three to five years old, what were you going to be as an adult?"
Taylor Goss:
When I was that age, I wanted to be a professional bull rider.
Sydney Hunt:
Ah, wow.
Raul Tahpa:
This one is from your past lover, it claims, the name is Tal. Is that how you say it? T-A-L? Tal.
Taylor Goss:
Tal? Tal is a current Knight-Hennessy Scholar and a dear friend.
Raul Tahpa:
And a past lover, as he claims.
Taylor Goss:
Oh my god.
Raul Tahpa:
What's your theory of change from music to the causes you care about?
Taylor Goss:
Connecting artists who are passionate about social causes with policy makers who have the means to distribute that art.
Willie Thompson:
Question number six. I'm going to go back to Taylor's mom. What was your Halloween costume for the high school friends party?
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. In my senior year of high school, I went to a high school friends party and I dressed at Jesus Christ.
Sydney Hunt:
Oh, wow. Did you have the long hair?
Taylor Goss:
Yes. I had both the long hair and the beard. It was quite funny.
Sydney Hunt:
Oh, goodness. Okay, okay. My final question from me, you'll hear, is from Marcus Forest, comma, friend. And this says, "What's one way you've helped Knight-Hennessy be more like your honors college at LSU and what's one way that it's different?" For that, I'll give you-
Willie Thompson:
So you get two sentences.
Sydney Hunt:
... two sentences. Yeah, yeah.
Taylor Goss:
Okay. I hope that I've helped Knight-Hennessy have as much music and play and compassion as I received from my honors college experience at LSU. Knight-Hennessy is different from my honors college experience at LSU in that it's growing to a scale, which eclipses LSU, comma, and I hope that Knight-Hennessy is able to offer the intimacy that can be maintained at our current scale, while bringing in as many people as possible.
Willie Thompson:
Fantastic.
Raul Tahpa:
Full stop.
Willie Thompson:
Raul.
Raul Tahpa:
Eighth question. Describe living in Lacassine, Louisiana in four words. No more than four words.
Taylor Goss:
Okay. Nature, peace, stars, family.
Sydney Hunt:
I love it.
Willie Thompson:
Well done.
Raul Tahpa:
Interesting.
Willie Thompson:
Last question, number nine. This is from someone we haven't heard from yet in the list of folks. This is from Bert, guitar accomplice and '79 Stanford grad.
Taylor Goss:
That is very true.
Willie Thompson:
Bert asked-
Taylor Goss:
Bert's family, the Keelys, have been so welcoming and kind to me. They're an adoptive family for me out here. They're lovely.
Sydney Hunt:
Nice.
Willie Thompson:
Beautiful. Which living artist's footsteps would you most like to follow and eventually lead further?
Taylor Goss:
Wow. That's a great question. Which living artist? Okay, that takes out a lot of folks.
Willie Thompson:
Takes out all the dead ones, basically. Is it Jack Harlow?
Taylor Goss:
It's not Jack Harlow. You know what? Okay. Since it's my last question, I'm going to take a point of personal privilege and go over a sentence for this.
Willie Thompson:
You got the clear out, bro. Go for it.
Taylor Goss:
Okay, okay. There's someone who is still alive and that I have met and I hope to emulate his artistry and his activism. His name is Jackson Browne, and he's a very successful singer/songwriter and is one of my personal favorite songwriters. I, incredibly serendipitously, attended a concert in Los Angeles that he was also attending, and we ended up watching the concert together, and he was gracious enough to invite me to visit his recording studio, which subsequently led to an internship at that studio.
Jackson Browne is a person who is incredibly inspiring, simply for the craft of his songwriting and for the potency of the emotional message in his music, but also for the fact that he has dedicated much of his life to social causes that he really deeply cares about, whether that's immigration or the environment, he's always been sort of at the forefront of actually using his voice and his music as a platform to advocate about the issues that he really cares about.
So throughout his career, his has both helped people younger than him, he has put out an incredible quantity and quality of music, and always stood his ground on social issues that he was passionate about. And if I can somehow emulate any percentage of that, and cultivate the kind of musical community that he has built around himself, I will be extremely happy.
Willie Thompson:
Well, thank you, Bert, for that question, and thank you, Taylor, for-
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, thanks, Bert.
Willie Thompson:
... that reflection. Ooh, that was rhyming. Before we end with Taylor's episode, we have to thank a couple of other members who are also leaving the Imagine A World podcast team, because they are completing the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program. So thank you, in addition to Taylor, we want to thank Kara Schechtman and [inaudible 01:02:19], who have been fervent supporters of the podcast, and have worked behind the scenes, in publicity, as well as on mic.
So just thank you both for the work that you all have contributed to this first season of what was an idea, and we're so excited to see what you're going to do as alumnae of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program. We're also sad to see you go. So we just wanted to thank everyone who has dedicated their time, talent, and treasure to this podcast endeavor. And with that, we'll send it back to Taylor. So Taylor-
Taylor Goss:
Yeah. Hey, Willie.
Willie Thompson:
It's been such a pleasure.
Taylor Goss:
Man, it's been such a pleasure.
Willie Thompson:
And I'll just take a note of personal privilege to thank you for being on this journey with your boy, with your bud, as you like to say in your Lacassine, Louisiana vernacular. Yeah, I definitely couldn't have done anything with this podcast, if you hadn't decided to stick with it, so I am very grateful for having had this relationship with you through the pod, as a friend, and you'll be dearly missed. I assume I can ask you random questions about audio engineering, if they come up.
Taylor Goss:
Anytime.
Willie Thompson:
But yeah, I'm just glad that I've had a chance to see, over 20 episodes and over two years in Knight-Hennessy, where folks are getting a chance to listen to an hour and some change. This episode's going long, y'all. It's okay. I just want to say thank you for all that you've poured into and devoted to this community. I definitely think, if you were a Knight-Hennessy Scholar any time between 2021 and 2024, you have some memory of Taylor Goss and-
Raul Tahpa:
For sure.
Willie Thompson:
... you have some affinity to him as a person, so I just want to say thank you for all the work you put in with our community to make it feel intimate and special. So with that, I just want to hear you send us out on a song. And maybe even, before you start the song, you mentioned that there's a story behind the song for the podcast. I'd love to have folks be able to have that as an awesome memento as you get ready for that.
Taylor Goss:
Wow. I'm so blown away. Thank you so much, Willie. I feel the same about you. Couldn't have done it without you. Literally, could not have done it without your organizational wizardry. Yeah, thank you, man.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah, of course, bro.
Taylor Goss:
And thank you all, Sydney and Raul, this means so much to me. This community means so much to me, and it has enriched my life so much that I could ramble on about it, but I could never really say what it means. But I deeply love the Knight-Hennessy community and deeply love that I was able to do this podcast and the many hours of music and community that I've been able to through this. So yeah, I appreciate that.
Yeah. I'll play y'all a song. It's an original song that I sort of wrote on a deadline, as I'm wont to do. I sort of am enabled by deadlines, in that I wait till the last minute, then the adrenaline gets me over the edge to actually finish.
Willie Thompson:
So you're a procrastinator is what we're saying.
Taylor Goss:
Yes, exactly. Yeah. And yeah, I'll probably record this song more professionally, but I'll give y'all a little bit of it.
Willie Thompson:
Ooh, early release.
Sydney Hunt:
Sounds good.
Raul Tahpa:
Let's hear it.
Sydney Hunt:
That sounds good.
Taylor Goss:
I'll just do a verse and a chorus of this one.
MUSIC:
One, two, one, two, three four.
My dreams caught up with me again last night.
The machinations of my uneasy mind.
I couldn't help but feel I'd been there before.
A trail of blossoms leading up to your door.
I said to call me anytime.
In retrospect I regret telling a lie.
Is being selfish such a crime.
Don't answer, baby, because I'm reading the signs line by line.
And if you say my name, I will turn to walk away.
It's a pleasure to have known you, but I do not want to stay.
You know bad directions lead to the most desperate destinations.
So I'm gonna change my lane, if you say my name.
Say my name, say my name, say my name.
Taylor Goss:
This has been Imagine A World. Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Imagine A World, where we hear from inspiring members of the KHS community who are making significant contributions in their respective fields, challenging the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible, as they imagine the world they want to see.
Willie Thompson:
This podcast is sponsored by Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, a multidisciplinary, multicultural graduate fellowship program providing scholars with financial support to pursue graduate studies at Stanford, while helping equip them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world. Follow us on social media at Knight-Hennessy, and visit our website at kh.standford.edu, to learn more about the program and our
