Why ‘In Love With All Good Music’ Is Malta’s Unofficial National Motto

‘In love with all good music’ – the phrase sounds like a throw-away Instagram caption until you spend a Friday night in Strait Street and realise it is Valletta’s unofficial motto. From the brassy blast of a local fanfare marching into the City Gate to the sub-bass thump of a Gozo farmhouse rave, Malta’s love affair with “all good music” is less a romantic notion than a national survival strategy: a way to stitch 30 centuries of invasion, migration and boom-bust economics into something that feels like home.

Ask any busker on Republic Street and they’ll tell you the islands never had the luxury of genre snobbery. When your population is smaller than Bologna’s, a wedding playlist has to please a 90-year-old bomb-shelter survivor and her 15-year-old TikTok nephew. The result is a musical stew where Ghana modal phrases rub shoulders with 1990s Italian power-ballads, and where a village feast brass band will happily segue into a Dua Lipa chorus if it keeps the crowd dancing. “In Malta, good music is simply whatever keeps the party—and the parish—alive,” says DJ and musicologist Dr. Toni Sant, who has archived over 5,000 hours of local recordings.

That pragmatic catholicity (small “c” intended) is now driving a quiet cultural renaissance. The Valletta Campus Theatre’s monthly “Sessjonijiet” invite metal guitarists to re-interpret traditional Maltese ballads; last season’s standout saw folk singer Claudia Faniello trading verses with death-metal vocalist Chris Brincat. The spontaneous recording landed on Spotify’s Mediterranean editorial playlist, racking up 120,000 streams—numbers that would make a London label executive salivate. “We didn’t plan a campaign,” laughs Faniello. “We just wanted to see if the Ghana scale could survive a seven-string drop-C tuning. Turns out it thrives.”

The economic spill-over is tangible. Airbnb data show 62 % of June bookings in Sliema and Valletta mentioned “live music” or “local DJ” in the guest’s search query. Meanwhile, boutique festivals such as “Glitch” in Gozo’s Xwejni salt pans sell out in 48 hours despite zero international headliners, proving that visitors are flying in for Malta’s sonic mash-up, not a carbon-copy of Ibiza. “Our USP is intimacy,” explains festival director Rachelle Deguara. “You can chat with the saxophonist over ħobż biż-żejt ten minutes after he’s shredded a solo.”

Crucially, the mantra “in love with all good music” is also a grassroots social tool. In Żejtun, youth NGO Moviment Graffitti runs “Beat Buddies,” pairing retired Ghana singers with 12-year-old beat-makers. The project started to keep kids off the streets during summer; it ended up producing an EP that samples 1950s field recordings from the American University Malta archives. Proceeds from Spotify royalties paid for new amps at the community centre. “We measured a 40 % drop in loitering complaints the month the EP dropped,” says coordinator Luke Bonnici. “That’s not just statistics; that’s policy you can dance to.”

Even the Church—once wary of anything louder than a pipe organ—has joined the chorus. Archbishop Charles Scicluna recently invited electronic producer Owen Leuellen to remix the “Laudate Dominum” for the millennium of Malta’s Christianity celebrations. The track, dropped at midnight mass on 31 December, trended at #2 on Maltese Twitter, just under the fireworks footage. “If the lyrics speak of love and hope, the genre is irrelevant,” Scicluna told reporters afterwards, inadvertently summarising the national ethos.

Of course, challenges remain: noise-abatement lawsuits threaten Strait Street bars, and Spotify algorithms still push Maltese listeners towards foreign playlists. Yet every weekend, balconies from Nadur to Naxxar light up with families arguing whether the brass band is speeding up the march (it always is). That cheerful bickering is the sound of a country that refuses to choose between its past and its future—because it has discovered the two can drop a beat together.

In Malta, falling “in love with all good music” is not a hipster slogan; it is citizenship itself. Bring an ear, bring an instrument, and the island will find you a verse.