Ari Gold
Ari Gold was an American singer-songwriter and screenwriter whose work moved across pop, adult contemporary, and R&B.
Born in the Bronx on February 11, 1974, Gold was educated at Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy and the Ramaz School before pursuing his studies further at Yale University and New York University. That arc — from the Bronx through a succession of academic institutions in New York and New Haven — shaped the trajectory of a creative life rooted in the city where it began.
As a singer-songwriter, Gold worked in English across multiple genres, his output touching the melodic conventions of pop, the smoother registers of adult contemporary, and the rhythmic textures of contemporary R&B. The range across those three modes suggests an artist willing to move between distinct sonic territories rather than settle into a single identifiable lane. Alongside his musical work, he also wrote as a screenwriter, extending his practice beyond performance and recording into the construction of narrative for the screen. The combination of roles — singer, songwriter, screenwriter — points to a sustained engagement with storytelling in more than one form, whether that story was carried by lyric and melody or by dramatic structure and dialogue.
Gold died in New York City on February 14, 2021, three days after his forty-seventh birthday, in the same city that had claimed him from birth. His work as a singer-songwriter, threading through pop, adult contemporary, and contemporary R&B, remains the central thread of his creative identity.
Quotes by Ari Gold
Ari Gold's insights on:
Happiness is a booty call: available and satisfying, but after a few hours, you’re ready to call an Uber and get back to your real commitments.
If you were to gather all the minutes wasted on insignificant, immaterial yik yak spent throughout the day and add them up, how much misspent time do you think you'd have? One hour? Two hours? Consider the sunk cost on that. It's unacceptable. One minute wasted is one minute too much.
Loving your work doesn’t mean finding a job you can tolerate for eight hours a day, but rather a job that gets you flying out of bed in the morning like a Jack Russell who just had a firecracker stuffed up his ass.
Opportunities are like night owls. They like to streak naked and howl at the moon. A lot of success in life comes down to luck. So put yourself in a position to get lucky. Because you know what happens if you don't go out? Nothing.
Fight, fight, fight and get that money, money, money. ’Cause happiness can’t buy even a nickel.
Unless you're in an early seventies-era Eagles cover band, a founding member of a religious cult, or sleeping under a bridge in Seattle, lose the beard and get a haircut. Power doesn't have time for any form of hirsute hipster self expression.
There's a reason caveman started to develop sophisticated tools before the meteor wiped them all out: It's so they could fucking shave. Do you know how frustrating it must have been to be hunched over all night trying to start a fire only to finally succeed just to have your beard go up in flames? No aloe vera back then.
Don’t waste time worrying about work/life balance, or looking for your best self, sham “secrets” or any other snake oil being pushed by sloppy hippies who have never built a business, let alone a bankroll, or you will wake up 20 years from now poor, pissed off and primed for a midlife crisis.