Roger Waters to Deliver 2020 SXSW Keynote Address

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters will deliver one of the keynote speeches at next year’s South by Southwest, set to take place March 13th through 22nd in Austin, Texas.

An exact date and venue have yet to be announced for Waters’ speech, and it’s unclear what exactly the musician will discuss. Previous musicians to deliver the SXSW keynote address include Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, Lady Gaga, Garth Brooks, Snoop Dogg and the Beastie Boys‘ Ad-Rock and Mike D.

Waters has had a relatively quiet 2019 after spending much of 2017 and 2018 touring the world with his Us + Them show. The performance featured dozens of Pink Floyd hits, Waters’ solo material and an engrossing light show with heavily political overtones — including imagery that took on Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, Palestine, anti-Semitism, the military industrial complex, neo-fascism and more. In October, a concert film — shot at the tour’s 2018 stop in Amsterdam — screened in movie theaters around the world.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Waters spoke about how the film helped him see how much the Us + Them show actually affected people, saying, “There’s one woman in the film who is singing along with the second verse in [Is This the Life’s] ‘Déjà Vu’ — I can’t remember which line — but she’s got a little tear running down her cheek. And I think, ‘Wow. I must have done something right that these young, young people are responding to work that I created when I was 74 years old.’ It’s moving. So I’ve done something right.”

Along with Waters, SXSW has also tapped filmmaker and author Erin Lee Carr to deliver the festival’s first film keynote address. Carr has helmed a variety of projects, including true-crime docs like Mommy Dead and Dearest and I Love You, Now Die. She most recently directed At the Heart of Gold about a sex abuse scandal that rocked U.S. gymnastics. In April, Carr published a memoir, All That You Leave Behind, which touched on her career as a filmmaker and served as a tribute to her father, the late columnist, David Carr.

Other speakers set to appear at SXSW next year include 50 Cent, Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett, bassist and YouTuber Adam Neely and designer Tommy Hilfiger.

via:: Rolling Stone