Music Is · A vision in progress
Everyone hears a song. Not everyone dances.
This is the story of an idea that started years ago as a question about music. It stalled. And it has finally found what it was really about: the people who make music, the people it moves, and what we lose when we stop noticing either one.
Where it began
A drive back from New York
In October 2018, my creative partner Jared and I were driving back from New York when he told me about an image he couldn’t shake. A man in a hospital bed, a heart monitor beeping, a nurse who puts headphones on him and presses play, and his eyes open. He called it Music Is Medicine.
It became the first project Jared and I ever shared equally. We turned that image into a series of interviews. Producers, a music therapist, a reggae artist, a painter, a pianist, and friends, each asked the same question: what is music?
Then life moved on, and the project went quiet. I kept every interview, including thirty minutes of Jared talking about what music meant to him.
- Oct 2018
The idea, on a drive home
- Then
Interviews: what is music?
- The names
Music Is · Music Made · Music Makes Me
- Quiet
Life moved on
- 2026
The song and the dance
Where it started
How we first imagined it
These films are the original idea, before it found its purpose. They’re the starting point, not the vision.
What it couldn’t figure out
Every answer was true. None of them were enough.
It never found its footing. Now I can see why.
“What is music?”
Everyone has an answer, and everyone already agrees. People don’t lean in to hear what they already believe.
“What does music do for you?”
Closer, because it’s personal. But a story about how a song made someone feel isn’t a reason to act, and it doesn’t carry a purpose bigger than the person telling it.
What I know now
A film should argue for something.
Years of making films have taught me one thing above everything else: a well-told story is one of the most powerful ways to shift what people believe. So the films this idea needs aren’t collections of opinions about music. Each one should be a cinematic argument for a point of view.
Mine comes from being a musician. Anyone can try, and anyone can enjoy it. But real musicianship, the artist’s mind, the skill of interpreting, the ability to say something without words, is not something anyone can pick up. Almost everyone wants to experience it. I always gravitate to music I know took real talent to make.
I was talking recently with Wendy Jehlen, the founder of ANIKAYA Dance Theater. She understands better than most how a story told through art connects to what’s happening in the world. I brought up the guy who travels the world with nothing but a guitar case. She said it plainly: we need him. The prodigy on the street corner. The musician who has carried one instrument through every country they’ve lived in. Those people are doing something important, and their stories need to be known.
The line on every shortcut app
Anyone can do it.
They can’t.
Now the world is filling with sound made by prompts and computers.
It’s music in the technical sense. But nobody lived it, and nobody gave it. I think that’s dangerous. Something human is being taken for granted, and we may not notice until it’s gone.
It was in the archive all along
They were already describing two sides of one thing.
“Listening to music is their expression. You don’t have to be able to create it to get that feeling.”
Jared, on people who aren’t musicians · Music Is interviews
“Without the music, dancing looks psychotic, like a mental break.”
Nana, after taking off his headphones at a silent disco · Music Is interviews
Years before I had words for it, the people in those interviews were already describing two sides of one thing. And there’s a madness in both. The madness of making something out of nothing, and the madness of a body moving to a sound no one else can hear. When I said “music and dance” to Wendy, her answer was two words: it’s madness.
The idea
The song and the dance.
The creator
Song
The music itself, and the person who made it. The years of practice nobody saw. The gift most of us can feel but can’t produce. Often uncredited, sometimes unknown, always human.
The receiver
Dance
What someone does with it. The way a song is used: to grieve, to heal, to remember, to move, to make something new. Not only dancing. Any human response to what was given.
The bridge between the two is where the stories are.
Why it matters
Know where your music comes from.
People eat differently once they know where their food comes from. They notice flavor, they choose with intention, and they value the hands behind it. I believe music deserves the same.
- The soil
- The farmer
- The kitchen
- You
- The years
- The hands
- The song
- You
If people knew what it took to create the songs they hear, they’d listen more intentionally, choose more carefully, and value the people who make it.
To what end?
To restore our appreciation for the music we live with and the people who make it, by uniting a global community that listens with intention.
I want to inspire people to find out where their music comes from. I want to connect the people who make it with the people it moves. And I want the human gift behind a song to be seen, credited, and valued, especially now.
In ten years
What I want to see.
People look at their music the way Food, Inc. made them look at their food.
People pick up instruments and learn the real way, without shortcut apps or trying to cut corners.
Our relationship to song has shifted. It brings people together as an alternative to screens, AI prompts, and cheap production. The brutal process of learning an instrument and writing a song is finally recognized, and so is the difference between using music and abusing it. Household names have joined a movement of analog music appreciation.
The commitment
Jared planted this idea. Growing it into that future is how I do right by him.
