One of the most common questions I get when people find out what I do for a living is do I get to meet famous people? The answer is yes, but it’s not as glamorous as it might seem. I’m not hanging out with movie stars, I’m mostly interacting with them in a professional capacity.

But in the summer of 2003 I had a job unlike any job I’d had before or since. Reality competition shows were all the rage and NBC decided to do a summer series based on the Fame franchise. It was a reality competition where the contestants had to sing and dance. It was hosted by Debbie Allen and Joey Fatone.

Joey would come on shoot days along with the celebrity judges, but Debbie was very heavily involved. She was not only an executive producer, she was in the trenches every day choreographing the dances and rehearsing the contestants. The brilliant accompanist and vocal coach the late Terrence Lee Jones was in charge of helping the contestants prepare their songs every week. I was hired to work with them both and directly with the contestants.

Because I was involved in the music selection for both the dancing and all of the singing, I worked closely with Debbie on each of the songs making sure that they were edited so the show played out the way she imagined it every week.

That summer with Debbie Allen was the most hands-on and intimate relationship that I formed with a celebrity on any show that I ever worked on. She was a powerful force. High standards, pulling 110% out of everyone. She was definitely a first class Hollywood diva but she used her diva powers for good. We worked every day at the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, a dance school for inner city children. She didn’t have to run that school. She didn’t have to do anything, but she’s the kind of person that got things done. That loving but hard and driven character that she played in the Fame franchise is not an act. She is the kind of celebrity that is very easy to respect.

Every week there were these big group numbers Debbie choreographed, where all the contestants danced together. One week she’d choreographed the opening number to a James Brown song and asked me to check with the music supervisor Evan Greenspan about getting the rights to use the song.

He said it might be tough to do that quickly. In his experience, James Brown’s label was very deliberative about who used his music, and that process took time. Unlikely we’d get clearance in time for that week’s show, but he’d try.

The days passed. The dancers rehearsed the dance. Permission still hadn’t shown up. Now it was crunch time. We were shooting the next day and we still didn’t have clearance to use the song.

While Debbie was perfecting the dance with the contestants in the other room, my phone rang. It was Evan. He was brief and to the point. I hung up and told everyone in the room that Evan said we can’t use the James Brown song.

One of the producers said something like, “Well, I certainly don’t want to tell Debbie that she can’t use the opening number the day before we shoot.” Which started the “not it” game that almost always follows when someone has to deliver bad news to the boss.

I also felt fear in that moment. I didn’t want her to get mad at me.

But I had never seen her get mad. I don’t think anyone had ever seen her get mad. Certainly not a crew member. Certainly not for something that was beyond their control.

So it occurred to me, what was I actually afraid of? Why did I assume she was going to react badly? That wasn’t very nice of me! So I said, no worries. I’m just gonna tell her.

When I informed her that we couldn’t use the song and she was going to have to change it, she didn’t get mad at all. She simply informed me that I was wrong. I believe her exact words were: “Oh no, baby. Don’t worry. We can use the song. It’s not gonna be a problem.”

Now I suddenly don’t know how I’m supposed to react. We can’t use the song without a license. We don’t have a license. The guy whose job it is to get us the license has informed me we’re not going to get one in time. And Debbie Allen is the executive producer. She knows very well we can’t use the song without a license.

So while I stared at her blankly, clearly at a loss for words, she says, “Just get the celebrity wrangler to get James Brown on the phone and I’ll take care of it.”

That was the moment I found out we had someone on the crew called the celebrity wrangler. I had never seen him. He kind of magically appeared at my door when summoned. When we asked him to get James Brown on the phone, he didn’t blink. He just said “got it,” turned around, and disappeared.

Fifteen minutes later he comes back and tells us, “James Brown doesn’t like to fly, and is currently in his limousine driving cross country, somewhere in the middle of Tennessee. He also doesn’t like cell phones, so he doesn’t have one. But he does have a fax machine in his limo. We can fax him, and he’ll pull over and call us back if he wants to.”

He handed me a slip of paper with a fax number on it and was gone. I never saw him again.

Debbie Allen handwrites a fax to James Brown. And I fax it to James Brown’s limo.

A little bit later my phone rings.

“Hello.”

“Yes, is Debbie Allen there?”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“This is James Brown.”

Not a lot of people sound like James Brown. It was obviously James Brown, who in my mind is now standing on the side of the road at a payphone. Do I put the hardest working man in show business on hold? I cup my hand over the receiver and whisper scream at whoever is nearby: “It’s James Brown! Go get Debbie right now!”

“Hold on, Mr. Brown. We’re getting her as fast as we can.”

So, I’m sitting silently holding the phone, listening to James Brown calmly breathe while my heart is going a thousand miles an hour until Debbie finally shows up. I could only hear one side of the conversation, which went a little something like this:

“Hey James, we have just got to use this song. It is just perfect and we have just got to use it, so we need you to say yes. So you’re gonna say yes, right? Perfect. Love you, baby. Thank you so much. It’s gonna be so great. Thank you so much. Love you, bye.”

And then she turned to me and said, “See, I told you. It’s all taken care of.”

And it was. The number went off without a hitch. All the paperwork got taken care of. And I had a small epiphany in that room that was the beginning of noticing a pattern. The producer’s desire not to be the bearer of bad news was a perfectly reasonable and normal response. If the game of “not it” had played itself out to the normal conclusion, the loser would be timidly approaching her, defensively delivering the news with body language and a tone in his voice that was expecting backlash. But in that moment, when I imagined her reacting in any of the myriad bad ways we were all imagining, none of them seemed realistic with the image I had of her in my head. And it felt almost disrespectful to not give her the benefit of the doubt that she had earned that she would react in a positive and productive way.

We are often driven by a fear that others are going to judge us as harshly as we judge ourselves, which is almost never true.

This mistake can surface in almost any part of your life, but it’s almost always shaped the same way. It’s always a thought you have where you think, if I do or don’t do X, then people will get angry or judge me harshly.

It might look something like, if I wear these shoes people will think less of me. Or, if I don’t get my mom a good birthday present she’s gonna be really mad at me. Or, if I explain to my boss all of the things that went wrong that were beyond my control, he’s gonna blame me anyway and then I’m gonna get in trouble. Or, if I tell the customer I made a mistake and sincerely apologize and try to make it right, the customer is gonna think I’m incompetent and it’s gonna snowball and ruin my career.

These are very dangerous thoughts because they actually affect your behavior. You make choices based on bad assumptions about others. Your decision about what to do next always hinges greatly on your prediction about how others will react. Instead of just coming clean to that customer and solving the problem, you might make excuses or even try to cover it up.

The danger is compounded because these thoughts are basically unavoidable. We all have them. But there is an easy way to take their power away from your decision making.

In this particular kind of story that we tell ourselves, we are the ones who have to suffer the bad outcomes. So it feels like we are judging ourselves harshly, something we’re all very comfortable with, but it is actually judging the other person harshly. You’re being mean when you entertain those thoughts.

The technique is something I call character switching. Instead of imagining how others will judge you or treat you if you do something you think they’re not gonna like just switch roles. Imagine that that person brought that bad news to you or wore socks you thought didn’t match their outfit. What would the best version of yourself do? You would most likely imagine yourself showing some compassion and understanding. Well now just extend them the same grace.

Ask yourself if you were a mother and your child gave you a gift you didn’t love, would you be mad? Most people would say no. So why are you judging your mother so harshly? Why are you assuming your boss or friend or customer won’t be understanding?

Most of us strive to be kind. It’s fair to assume that the people in your life will be kind to you. And if you stop and think about it, very few people have given you reason to assume otherwise.

If you assume that the other person will be understanding you will make very different choices, and you will find that when you make it your practice, the mean people quickly out themselves. And it makes it very easy to surround yourself with people who are actually at least trying to be kind and understanding. It’s actually most people, celebrity or not.

In almost every desirable industry there’s some kind of canonized gatekeeper. If you want to be a lawyer, you have to pass the bar. If you want to be a doctor, or a cosmetologist, or a plumber, or almost anything in a desirable industry you need a license or a certificate of some kind. There’s some formal filter that limits the number of people who can walk around and claim they’re an accountant or whatever it is. But no such filter exists for Hollywood. Anyone can just decide they’re a director, or an actor, or a costume designer, and show up and tell everybody that’s what they are and what they’re here to do.

Hollywood used to have a studio system, where everyone worked for a big movie studio. The studios had internships and apprenticeships and a ladder to climb in each craft and essentially they functioned as those gatekeepers. But long before I got here the studio system fell apart and Hollywood became a town full of freelancers moving from job to job. Without a formal gatekeeping system to act as a filter an organic and terrible filter arose to replace it. It’s enforced by a lot of things, from the culture that exists here to the way the unions and productions are structured, but basically Hollywood’s “licensing agency” is to torture people. Especially talented people. No matter who you are, it’s going to take years before you can make a living, and in those years you’re going to be struggling financially. You’re going to have opportunity after opportunity right at your fingertips, ripped away from you. You’re going to feel like a failure. You’re going to feel like a loser. People who care about you are gonna be telling you you’ve made a mistake. And if you’re smart and normal, you’re going to get to the point where it just doesn’t seem worth it anymore.

There’s no precise number, but industry estimates are that ninety-some-odd percent of the people who move to Hollywood to “make it” end up going home.

So Hollywood is not made up of the most qualified. It’s made up of the most tenacious. You’ll meet all types of people across the hundreds of thousands who make up this industry, but the one thing every one of them shares is a burning ambition that won’t let them quit. And as a result, we live in a culture where no amount of success is ever enough.

I know I am a slave to that ambition.

I went to college at SUNY Binghamton in upstate New York. There were a lot of jobs on campus that students could get, but the most coveted one was driving the blue buses. Being a student gave us access to the city buses, which were pretty good, but students lived off campus in very concentrated areas and traveled to very specific parts of town to and from campus in patterns that didn’t really match what the city buses had to offer. So there was a second student run bus service with school buses painted blue, driven by Binghamton students, on routes built to be helpful to the students. Being a blue bus driver was the highest paying student job on campus, and you got to learn how to drive a big blue school bus, so it was a pretty prestigious job if you could get it.

The only year I lived off campus, I happened to live right on a city bus route that took me to campus, so I never really took the blue bus.

Binghamton gets exceptionally snowy in the winter. One day during what looked like it could turn into a really bad blizzard I checked the news to see if I should stay home. Even though the public schools had closed, the university was still open and the city buses were still running. So I went outside, got on the bus, and headed to school. I probably should have realized it was a red flag when I was the only person on a normally crowded bus. But I just sat there oblivious looking at the snow until the city bus driver turned around and told me they’d just radioed all the buses back to the downtown station. They were shutting down bus service, and they were closing the university too. We were almost there and my house was the other way from downtown. “I usually pick you up on Kneeland Ave, right?”

I guess he did pick me up a lot. I never really thought about it. “Yup. I live by that stop.”

“What’s your address? I’m taking you home before I go back.”

I basically got chauffeured home in a city bus, in the middle of a very precarious snowstorm, by a very brave bus driver who insisted he was going to get me home no matter what.

What normally would have been a 20 minute drive took about 2 hours.

We sat in silence like one does on a bus for a few minutes then he asked me what my major was.

“Ah..A music man” was his response when I told him. He asked probing questions about the classes I was taking, the professors I had, the paper I was working on. He told me he had also gone to Binghamton. He majored in American history, and that’s where he learned to drive the bus. He had been a blue bus driver. He enjoyed being a blue bus driver and studying American history so much that he stayed for two more years after he graduated and got his master’s degree. Then he did what most academics do and moved to Boston, got his PhD in American history, and began teaching at a well known university.

He had achieved everything he’d set out to achieve in his academic career. A faculty position at a good school. He was pretty much set for life.

Except he hated everything about it. Grading papers made him miserable. Lecturing in front of full lecture halls gave him anxiety. He loved learning history. He hated teaching it.

As he skillfully darted in and out of snowbanks I wouldn’t have driven a golf cart through, he told me he used to lie awake at night and tell his wife that the only time he was ever happy was when he was driving a bus in Binghamton and reading books about American history.

He said his wife tried to convince him for almost four years to go back. She was an elementary school teacher and could get a job anywhere. She argued that being a city bus driver certainly paid less and was less prestigious than being a professor. But it also cost a lot less to live in Binghamton than it did to live in Boston, and their lifestyle wouldn’t have to change that much. His wife kept making that argument until finally, one day, he just quit. He moved back to Binghamton, got a job driving the bus, and spent his spare time back in the university library reading books about history.

And he was happy.

He took me to school a couple of times a week for the rest of that year. He called me Music Man and I called him Doctor Driver. I’m not sure I ever knew his real name.

Back then I thought of him as some kind of hero. But now, honestly, I live in a world where the story of going from university professor to bus driver is a tragedy. A downgrade. A demotion. But for Doctor Driver it was liberation. Freedom from all of the tortures that his industry inflicted on him and demanded he endure to climb the ladder. How can a move that makes your life happier be considered a demotion?

I’ve come to realize that there’s another hero in Doctor Driver’s story, his wife. She did the hard work that was necessary to convince him to do what he already knew he had to do to be happy.

What’s crazy is that the reason he had to be convinced by his wife to make that move is because it’s so hard in our society to move to a position that feels like it’s “down.” He knew what would make him happy, and he was right about it, because he’d already been driving that bus for fifteen years by the time we got caught in that blizzard.

But before he could get the thing he knew he needed, he had to untell himself the story we’ve all been trained to tell ourselves. That story that we measure our success in life by our success at work.

Just knowing what he needed to be happy wasn’t enough. His internal narrative had to change too. He had to learn to tell himself a different story than the one that’s been pre-installed in all of us: that our value in life and our value in the marketplace are the same thing.

What makes you happy is not really in your control. We like what we like and we don’t know why one person prefers chocolate and the other prefers vanilla. A lot of suffering comes from internalizing a narrative that we’re not supposed to like something we actually do.

Doctor Driver is a hero because he overcame that. His story feels romantic because it is. He learned to love himself and stop judging himself, and only then was he able to go home and get his “happily ever after.”

The part of the story that I still need to learn to tell myself is that I can’t get one if I keep believing that life is an infinitely tall ladder that must be climbed.

Jonathan was no regular executive producer. He was actually the head of television for Jerry Bruckheimer Productions at the time. He wasn’t just an executive producer on our show, but at the same time also produced Without a Trace, three different CSIs, and The Amazing Race, not to mention the forty or so other TV shows and the Broadway shows he would produce across his incredible and continuing career. Suffice to say, when it comes to television, Jonathan clearly knows what he’s talking about.

And what we were all talking about back then was, obviously, the strike. “The last writers strike was in 1988,” he said. “And you know what came out of that one? The reality show Cops. During the last writers strike we all sat around and thought, maybe we can do this without writers. And Cops was an experiment in a new business model that was the basis for modern reality television.”

Then Jonathan made a prophetic-level prediction, followed by an offhand comment that set me on a journey that would shape the next few years of my life. “Warner Brothers makes an episode of Sarah Connor Chronicles,” (which was a popular sci-fi show based on the Terminator that was on TV at the time) “and spends $2.6 million an episode while Mark Burnett makes American Gladiators for 800 grand an episode and gets twice the viewers. Why would anyone want to make Sarah Connor Chronicles?” He was explaining the business implications of the giant gap between the profitability of making narrative, dramatic television and making reality TV shows. “Mark my words,” he said. “When this is all over, you’re going to see an explosion of reality television. Every network is going to keep a few dramas on the air because that’s how they brand themselves, but all the other time is going to be filled with reality TV.” Then, almost as an aside he joked “You want to make some money? Come up with some ideas for reality TV shows, because everyone’s gonna be buying them.”

I don’t think he meant it as advice, he was making a joke. But that evening I called one of my closest friends, Ethan, who was a comedy writer, and I said, if Jonathan Littman makes a prediction about how to make money in the television industry, it’s probably a good idea to take it seriously. So we started our own production company. “Staff House Productions” was basically just me and Ethan sitting in his living room trying to come up with fun and creative ideas for reality TV shows, and then going around town trying to sell the ideas to various production companies.

It started almost as a lark. We spent a couple of afternoons brainstorming and making pitch materials, then I called the production company where I had worked and had friends and asked if they would take our pitch? They actually seemed to genuinely like our ideas, but said they weren’t exactly perfect for their company and suggested we look for companies that made shows like the ones we were pitching. So we cold called producers and said, hey, we were just pitching over at JM Productions and they suggested we bring this show to you. Over the next couple of years we managed to sell a few ideas, then sell a pilot to Lifetime, then create a game show for Cartoon Network called Brain Rush. We basically had a little run at becoming reality show producers. Ultimately, for many reasons which all make good topics for future essays, I decided that music editing was where I wanted to be. But with hindsight, the effects of that 2007 writers strike on not just me, but the entire trajectory of the television industry, are undeniable.

Then it happened again in 2023. The writers went on strike, only this time the actors joined them too. But there had been a huge shift since that last writers strike that was going to change everything about the way the producers reacted, and that shift was streaming. Back then our shows were being broadcast by the big three networks, and a few premium and basic cable networks that were producing original content, all of whom were big Hollywood companies. But now our shows are being broadcast by Apple and Amazon. Big international conglomerates have bought most of the big Hollywood companies. No longer were Hollywood producers sitting around in rooms asking each other how they could make television without writers. Corporate executives, for whom production is just a small department, were sitting around in rooms asking themselves how they could make television without Hollywood. And other options were open to them.

Twenty-five years ago, if you watched a movie or TV show, you knew within thirty seconds if it was made in Hollywood or not. There was a polish that only we could get, a level of professionalism that required an embedded industry with thousands of trained craftsmen working inside of infrastructures that really only existed in this one place. But that isn’t true anymore. There are talented and competent crews all over the planet. Hollywood has gone from the entire marketplace to a Gucci bag, an expensive, high-quality, name-brand product where a certain type of discerning consumer pays the extra money because that kind of elite product is worth it to them. Now, there is a market for Gucci bags. But it’s not the entire market. Hollywood is becoming an important but small segment as market forces push production elsewhere. After that 2007 strike, people didn’t like watching television any less. Viewers migrated to cable and moved around to find their new favorite shows, because reality TV really is entertaining.

With just a few years of hindsight, we see the same thing happening again. The 2023 strike is once again having a profound effect on the future of Hollywood, not because the circumstances or market forces are the same, but because once again it forced the powers that be to reassess the entire business model. How this all shakes out is still unknown, but in the meantime, Hollywood is in transition, and being forced into big transitions always feels painful.

Nobody wants to make big changes against their will. Transitions can be scary so we naturally resist. But the resistance to change is exactly why it’s painful. You don’t want to change, and you feel forced to, so change sucks. But when you do want to make a big change it’s the opposite. It can be equally scary, but it feels electrifying. It’s exciting. An opposite emotional reaction because you imagine an opposite outcome. But the future is actually a mystery.

Sometimes things go how we expect, but sometimes changes we make with intention, because we think they’re going to make our lives better, turn out really badly. And sometimes those changes we were forced into, that we resisted, even the seemingly terrible ones, turn out to be improvements in our lives.

After Ethan moved to Austin and Staff House Productions closed its doors, I built Mind Meld Arts, which grew into one of Hollywood’s largest boutique music editing companies. Over the next few years I watched my roster grow from just me to eight full time music editors sometimes working on as many as 15 projects simultaneously. Before this last strike I had two other full-time music editors on my team alone. I don’t think we’ll ever grow back to that size again. I’m lucky if I can keep four people on payroll now. I don’t know what the future of my company will be. I don’t know what the future of this industry will be. And I don’t know what my future will be.

So here I am, being forced to change against my will, and my brain automatically tells me a story about how bad that is. But the truth is, my brain has no idea. The future is a mystery. And I have, as a tool, at my disposal all of these stories where forced change turned out well for me. And so do you. We all do. Those are the stories I revisit all the time now. I tell myself those stories over and over to remind myself of all the times I was forced to change and it turned out great.

Only after I’ve done that, while I’m still thinking about that, do I give myself permission to tell myself the story of what’s going to happen after this change. I think of it as “narrative priming.” I fill my brain with stories, true stories, personal stories that have meaning to me, where a similar struggle to whatever struggle I’m going through now turned out good. It doesn’t eliminate fears of the future, it doesn’t solve all of my anxieties, but it helps me think of happy endings. It helps me imagine believable personal stories of how I’m going to get those happy endings. And as much as I can I try to make sure it’s those stories that guide my actions.

There was a moment when we were recording the score for I Still Know What You Did Last Summer when I realized the answer is no. We are never having the same experiences.

A lot of times when a film score is being recorded by an orchestra the composer will conduct. But, a lot of times they will hire a conductor. There are a couple of reasons why a composer might choose to hire a conductor on a recording session. Some of them want to sit next to the conductor in the “live room” with the orchestra and really focus on what they're hearing without having to worry about communicating with the players while they're playing. Some composers would rather sit in the “control room”, a separate room where the recording engineer sits in front of speakers and monitors the recording, because ultimately they are responsible for what the music sounds like coming out of the speakers, not what it sounds like in the room with the orchestra. The energy of all the players in the room is exciting and a live orchestra always makes everything sound beautiful and that can be misleading. Some of them simply don't know how to conduct an orchestra. But the most valuable thing a film orchestra conductor brings, the primary reason most people want one, is their ears. Having another set of ears to help make sure everything is perfect is invaluable and these conductors have superhuman ears. They can hear what every single instrument is playing and connect what they're hearing in real time with what they're seeing on the page. They can then instantly provide critical insight on how the individual musicians can change their performances to make the entire orchestra sound better.

John Frizzell, the composer for I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and my boss at the time, had hired Pete Anthony to be the conductor on that score. Before the recording session, we were going over the scores with Pete one piece of music at a time, to make sure he didn't have any questions and that he had what he needed. In one of the pieces of music, John had written this little moment where, after the cue had ended and the strings were holding out the last chord, the violas just subtly played a few notes from the theme of the movie. Pete saw that and joked, "There's one for the music majors in the audience." John laughed, but I didn't get the joke. "Do you really think regular people don't hear that?" I asked him. And he responded, "I don't know what regular people hear."

He was right. All three of us had spent years learning how to deconstruct a piece of music into its pieces. Orchestration, chord progressions, harmonies, melodies, bass lines, inner voices versus outer voices, all of these and dozens of other little bits and pieces add up, in a musician’s mind, to make a piece of music. And I, along with many other musicians, hear music as a sum total of those bits and pieces. But most people don't. Most people hear a piece of music as a single thing, a piece of music.

I can't do that anymore, and honestly, I miss it. I don't think it's true for all musicians. I think some musicians can turn that analytical part of their brain on and off and just experience the piece of music the way most people get to. But I can't do that. I'm always hearing details of production and orchestration and harmonies. The older I get and the better I get as a musician, the more of those details I can hear and the further deconstructed the listening experience becomes.

I'm not complaining. It's a good thing. I have way more avenues to find joy in music now. I can obviously still feel all the emotion in music, the way any human can, and I can also experience all the intellectual pleasures of brilliant songwriting and brilliant production. It's no better or worse than the way non-musicians experience music, but it is different and it took a lot of learning, practice and time.

I don't think that necessarily means my brown could be your purple. But I do think it means a visual artist looks at color differently than I do, even if they're seeing the same colors. I do think it means a structural engineer experiences driving over a bridge differently than I do even sitting in the same car. Once you realize that who you are and what you know and where you've been and what you bring to the table affect how you experience every experience you have, then you have to accept that even in exactly the same circumstances, everyone else is truly having their own different experiences.

This “experience gap” affects every relationship in your life. Every casual conversation, every business meeting, every deep moment shared between two lovers. No matter how intimate your encounter with another person, you're never having the same experience. You can’t ever have the same experience. Sadly, that gap that always exists between us, even in our most intimate moments, is the primary cause of misunderstandings. It's the reason you have to hear both sides of any story to try to piece together what really happened. And it's the reason why, almost every time, whatever the story, whoever is telling it is the good guy.

It's easy to feel despair about that gap. But, like any gap, it is an opportunity to build connections. It can be very humbling to recognize that often the other person's side of the story isn't wrong, they legitimately had a different experience than you. Once you truly internalize that fact, and the existence of that experience gap becomes a part of your internal narrative, it becomes a lot harder to blame other people for having a different perspective no matter how contrary it is to yours.

“Put yourself in the other person’s shoes” is advice we have all gotten and probably even given to someone at some point. But that kind of empathy, especially when things are contentious, is a lot easier said than done because you already have a narrative of what happened. In your story, they behaved in a way you wouldn’t have. In your mind reconciliation lies not in you having changed anything, but in them having acted differently or drawn a different conclusion than they did. When you put yourself in their shoes, you imagine you would have done something different than they did and that doesn’t actually get you any closer together. 

There’s a method you can use to help close that gap. You can’t modify your own belief about “what really happened” as easily as you can tell yourself a new story. So the secret to closing the experience gap is something I call “narrative replacement.” Imagine a totally different experience. Tell yourself, in your mind, a different story with a totally different set of characters. Tell yourself a story where whatever the other person is claiming happened to them happens to you. 

Let’s take a simple common example. Your friend thinks you excluded her on purpose and from your perspective that never happened. Human nature at that moment is to deny the allegation, to try to correct her narrative. “I would never exclude you. I love you” might be the first thing that pops into your mind to say. You then seek evidence to support your narrative, “I called you last week twice and left a message.” This approach, while feeling like a justified expression of your love for your friend, does nothing to close the experience gap. It just shines a light on it.

The traditional “putting yourself in their shoes” is equally unhelpful. It’s easy to imagine that had you received those phone calls you would have called back, or interpreted them differently. It’s easy to imagine your story from their side and that’s not closing the gap at all, it’s actually furthering your own narrative that they could have and probably should have acted or interpreted events differently.

The secret is not to try to accept their narrative as a replacement for yours, but employ “narrative replacement” and imagine a totally different event. In this new story you are actually excluded by your friends. In this new story you play their role and a totally different person plays yours. You will never truly believe that you excluded them. Their story won’t feel true no matter what character you pretend to inhabit in retelling it. But you can easily accept this new story as an independent narrative.

Narrative replacement works because imagining their story, which feels like a fiction to you, replacing yours, which feels like reality, is almost impossible. Imagining a totally different story where your friends actually exclude you is simple.

How did you react in that new story? Is it really that far from how they reacted now? What could the characters in your new story do to help you? Can you do any of those things in this situation? 

Once you practice and get good at reacting not to the story your brain tells you about what “actually happened” but to the story you are choosing to tell yourself, then you've done basically all the work of crossing that gap. And the beautiful thing is that what lies on the other side is understanding. Not just understanding the other person’s side, but often understanding yourself better. The gift you give yourself when creating a narrative truly based on the other person’s experience, is that you get to see yourself from the outside. A view you aren't ever truly privy to.

When I arrived in the fall of 1995, an entirely new category of tools for recording and making music were appearing in the marketplace, software. The transition from analog to digital was hotly debated in the professional recording industry. The sound quality of digital was unusable at first. Digital audio was for making weird noises and effects, not pristine recording. But it got better and better.

While the quality debate was still raging, recording, mixing and manipulating your music on a computer over a piece of tape had such advantages that everyone was realizing you could not stay competitive if you didn’t make the transition. Once everyone was consuming their music on a CD, the first ubiquitous, commercially successful digital audio format, the question of whether or not computerized audio was better or worse sonically was suddenly no longer relevant. Everyone was going to be listening to digital copies of your music. Your music is going to be digitized eventually, and if you do it now, at the beginning, in the production stage, you get lots of advantages. Your competition is doing it. You are gonna have to do it too. Everyone knew they had to do it, but no one knew how to do it.

Enter eager 21-year-old Micha with a degree in audio engineering and a lifelong love of computers. Not only was I unafraid of the software, I was excited by what it could do. That was really my only marketable skill at the time. These guys who knew way more about audio than I ever will suddenly didn’t know how to press the record button. I made a lot of my connections and built a reputation by making myself useful, just being the hands on the computer keyboard for people whose hands were much more used to being on a mixing console. It’s amazing how quickly you can learn from someone when they’re standing behind you, painstakingly explaining to you in detail exactly what they want you to do and what kind of outcomes they expect.

By now those computer skills have become mundane. High school students make music on computers using much more advanced technology than was available to us at the time. But back then, when computers and software were becoming more powerful, being able to ride the wave of the technological revolution set me up for the next phase, when those tools became mundane. Of course, by that time I had decades of experience.

Ten years ago I used to say to people, I don’t think I would have a career if I showed up in Hollywood now, because I don’t know how I would differentiate myself. But here we are again. A new kind of technology has crossed the threshold. AI has followed the same exact trajectory. A fledgling tool that seemed like a toy to the professionals, that was only the purview of a few nerds, grew in power until it became a consumer product used ubiquitously by the public. It grew in power again until the experts had to take notice. The AI flight is landing in Hollywood and frankly everywhere else right now. And the people who know how to show up at the same time will lead us into the next phase.

ChatGPT is the CD. The debate about whether or not the outputs from AI are better or worse is over. It’s been widely enough adopted that it’s here whether we like it or not. And now the professional tools are appearing. Not just the earth shattering generalized tools like chats and agentic AIs, but targeted professional software packages. A myriad of specialized, industry-specific AI tools not just in music production, but across almost every industry.

I remember the people screaming that it was the end of audio engineering. That the computers were going to replace us. And I definitely saw lots of engineers with incredible ears and amazing talent fight digital audio until they became irrelevant. But most people learned the new tools and became better for it. And some of us took advantage of that moment in time to climb a ladder that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to even touch.

We are once again at a great moment of transition. Nobody knows what the future is gonna look like, even in the very near term, but we have had these transitions before and the pattern is predictable. Each time the transition fills the future with something we all rightfully fear, the unknown. Each time the new tools make us all more productive and better at our jobs. We are once again at a time when old jobs are being erased or redefined while new jobs that no one could have imagined even last month are springing up like crazy. These transitions are hard and when it’s all over and we are on the other side, there will be a lot of stories of how people weathered this storm.

I see a lot of people out there telling themselves the story that the computers are coming for them, the story that they’re going to be obsolete. A lot of people live in some kind of generalized fear that “the robots are coming for our jobs.” The truth is, that will be a lot of people’s story when this is all over.

But there are a lot of people telling themselves a lot of other stories right now. They are telling themselves stories about how AI is gonna make their lives easier, stories about how AI will amplify their expertise to help guide us into this next phase. Some people are learning everything they can about AI, being the nerds of their generation, because their story is that they’re gonna be prepared for whatever the hell it is that comes next.

All of those stories are stories people are telling themselves right now and all of those stories will be somebody’s story when this transition is all over. We don’t get to choose which one of those stories we tell in the end, but every one of us certainly gets to choose which version we tell ourselves now. And the story you tell yourself now is the most powerful tool you have to control that uncertain future. We are all living in whatever story we tell ourselves we are. Your internal narrative is the most control you have over the unknown future right now.

Both stories will be equally true in the future. The people who ride this AI transition to success will be telling stories just as truthful as the people who fight it and lose. Right now, you get to decide which narrative belongs to you.

One of my closest friends has really been making strides lately in his acting career. We were going over all of the things he has been doing that have really been helping move his career forward and were brainstorming about the next step when he said that he believed his next step is to get a manager.

At that moment, alarm bells went off in my head. He’s confusing an episode for a scene.

There’s an interesting quirk about the way that television narratives are organized. The narratives are broken up into seasons, which have numbers, season one, season two, etc. The seasons are broken up into episodes. Every episode of television has a name. Episodes are broken down into acts, which are numbered. Acts are broken down into scenes which are numbered and finally pages, which are numbered.

Episodes have names, everything else is just numbered. Why?

I think this tells us something about how we organize stories in our minds. Events happen sequentially. Then we take individual events (pages) and add them up to bigger events (scenes). We then add those scenes up to complete narratives, self-contained stories, which we name (episodes), and then move on to the next episode.

Whether it’s chapters in books, or classes in a college major, or the stories we tell about our own lives we see this kind of structure appearing everywhere we organize our thoughts into continuing narratives. At some point, you have to give up the granularity of individual events and package a whole bunch of them up into a single story that you can recall with a short title. “I went on vacation to Hawaii.” “I got a new job.”

As a result of this narrative compression, we often forget how many little steps there were to get from point A to point B in our lives. So, we often underestimate the number of scenes we are going to have to live out before we get to the next episode. And even worse, this compression often makes us confuse an episode for a scene. We compress an entire narrative into a single event.

A scene is something that happens, a singular event. An episode is not an event, but rather the outcome of a series of events. Your next step can’t be an entire episode, it has to be the next scene.

This is a trap that I have fallen into many times in my life. Confusing an episode for a scene can paralyze you and make it impossible to move forward because you just can’t figure out what you’re supposed to do next.

There is a test you can apply to make sure that the next step you are imagining in your story is a scene and not an episode.

Tell yourself the story of your next step.

When you tell the story of a scene it requires no further explanation. You simply say what happened.

“I researched online and made a list of potential managers and spoke to an actor I respect about how to approach them.” That’s a scene. That’s what happened. A series of actions taken by a character. No further explanation needed.

When you tell the story of an episode, it is not a series of actions. “I got a manager!” is an episode. Notice there’s no action. There’s no doing of specific tasks by specific characters. There’s just an outcome that demands you tell me more.

Your next step can’t be “getting a bigger client” or “finding a girlfriend”. Those are outcomes. Your next step has to be a scene, a series of actions taken by you and other characters in your life story.

Sometimes confusing an episode for a scene can be more than just a mistake. I have come to realize that mistaking a goal for a task is a subconscious trick I use to put a wall in front of myself when I am afraid. It’s a hiding place. It’s a way to stop moving forward. I can’t take the next step without a bigger movie, a longer running series or some other goal that’s outside of my control that I’ve convinced myself is the next scene.

Yes, you may need a manager, or an investor or a partner or a slew of other hurdles you must overcome to make it to the next season, but you also need to be able to keep moving forward until you land one. You also have to be able to tell a believable success story to yourself made up of all the scenes between now and the happy ending…even if one never shows up. Because all you ever really need is a next step forward.

We hired Sid Page to play country fiddle. This was the first time I had met him. I didn’t know who he was. He was clearly a bluegrass expert. I didn’t know that he was playing with the Santa Rosa Symphony at thirteen and that as a child they called him “Symphony Sid.” I didn’t know that he played with Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, and Roy Orbison and Jerry Garcia. I just knew he showed up and played the hell out of that fiddle.

Imagine my surprise when a few months later, I bumped into him on an orchestral recording date. He wasn’t just playing in the orchestra. He was first chair first violin, the concertmaster.

I said something to him, expressing my surprise to see him in such a different musical setting, and he said, “It’s funny. Half of the composers in town think of me as a fiddle player and won’t hire me to do classical gigs, and half of them think of me as a classical player and won’t hire me to do fiddle gigs.”

It was clearly not the first time he had said that sentence. In an industry where people specialize it’s very rare to find a Sid Page. What happened to him was that he was getting pigeonholed, people were putting him in too small a box in their minds. It’s easy to understand why. When you see someone do something, and that’s all the information you have to craft the story in your mind about who that person is, that’s what the story will be. The only reasonable conclusion that I could draw from watching him play country fiddle was that he was a country fiddle player. It’s hard to imagine that someone could do it so well if they hadn’t dedicated their lives to it. And if the first thing I had done was seen him play classical violin, it would only be reasonable to conclude that he had dedicated his life to that.

This was a problem that obviously had been plaguing him because he had crafted this brilliant solution. One sentence that changed the story in my mind. Before he said that sentence, I thought of him as a country fiddle player. After he said it, my story for him was that he was both. Being pigeonholed meant less work, and he needed people to understand the range of his talents. So he did the simplest thing. He told me a story. A story about other people. He didn’t state facts. He gave me a narrative about him to replace the one in my head. I didn’t realize the lesson he was teaching me at the time.

Nowadays when we want to show music in progress to a director or producer, we send them videos over the Internet. Back then the internet didn’t do that yet, so they had to drive across town and come to the composer’s studio. A particular director on a TV movie we were working on didn’t want to make the drive. He just basically said, “I trust John. I trust John.”

Well, when we got to the final mix stage, it turned out that the director was not as happy as he thought he was gonna be. Since there was no music editor on this movie, I, as John’s assistant, sat on the mix stage with headphones on and re-cut the score for the entire film. The picture editor, Christopher Nelson, sat next to me for two weeks and helped me through it.

Flash forward a year later, and Chris calls me. He’s got his first job as a producer on a TV show. It’s called The Education of Max Bickford, starring Richard Dreyfuss, and he has a first-time composer and wants me to come be the music editor for his show.

I told him I was a composer and not a music editor.

He assured me. “Oh no, you’re a music editor.”

And then he told me it was a union job with benefits that paid weekly, and I had just gotten married and I really, really wanted to take it.

But I had been advised against it. John’s agent warned me that if I took it, it would be the end of my composing career. I had just scored my fourth feature film and I didn’t see how that was remotely possible. She told me people will pigeonhole me. I didn’t believe her.

I took the job.

It was my first union music editing job, and it launched my career. Was it a mistake? I don’t know. But I do know it was basically the end of my composing career.

When people think about you, they think about a story, and if you don’t tell them that story they’re gonna make up their own. They’re gonna make it up with just the information in front of them, and that’s almost never enough to tell anyone the complete picture of who you are.

Sid had practiced an answer. A new story to tell about who he was. Not just the great fiddle player I was watching before my eyes, but a man who could play anything on the violin, and silly people were mistakenly not realizing that. That became the new story I thought about when I thought about him. And he put it in my mind in one sentence.

It’s impossible to show people everything you can do. You almost never have enough time to show people everything you want them to see before they’ve formed a narrative in their mind about who you are.

Ironically, being good at something increases the risk of being pigeonholed. When you show people you are a brilliant country fiddle player, who isn’t gonna think, “Wow, what a brilliant country fiddle player”? Everyone’s going to, as they should. When I started going around town working as a music editor, and more and more people saw me as a music editor, and more and more opportunities opened up for me as a music editor, how could anybody think of me as a composer anymore?

Sid knew the secret I didn’t. You gotta tell them. You have to proactively author your own story in the minds of others, because if you don’t, they’re going to author it for you, and they don’t really know all the complexities that make you you.

Notice when people are making misconceptions about you or pigeonholing you. Figure out the specific things about you that routinely get left out of people’s narrative about you. And then do what Sid did. Make sure you know what story to tell to fill the holes in other people’s narratives.

Author or be authored. The story people are telling themselves about you is being written right now, either by you or by whoever’s looking. If you don’t have your narrative ready, others will write one for you.

After a brief and unhappy side challenge in the record industry, I was looking to move back into the TV and film world and in 1997 I got an opportunity to work as an assistant composer in his studio. I took this job and all of a sudden I’m working on the most popular shows on television. My first week there we were doing Seinfeld, Caroline in the City, Married with Children, a new show with Tony Danza, and six or seven other shows all at the same time. I was dropped into this whirlwind of sitcoms, and all of a sudden I had to keep the biggest secret in the world.

The Seinfeld finale was the most anticipated television event of the decade. Fifty-eight percent of TV viewers in America, an estimated 108 million people, tuned in that night. NBC made sure the ending was a secret. The table read happened on a closed set. All but one copy of the script was destroyed afterward. A decoy ending scene was shot to throw off leakers. Cast, crew, audience, we all signed NDAs. The whole country was clamoring to know how the show was going to end which led to five months of speculation, magazine covers and watercooler arguments.

One of the things you don’t realize about having a career in television until you have one is that people will constantly be begging you for spoilers that they don’t really want. Everyone you know who watches the show you’re working on wants to talk to you about it. I always have to ask “Where are you in the story, what’s the last thing that happened.” I have to remember what it felt like to be in the audience at that moment, and put myself there because I always know the future.

Every television professional knows how to not give spoilers even when pressured. Most of the time it’s not like Seinfeld, it’s not because the media is clamoring to know. It’s because it’s part of my responsibility to not ruin it for people around me. The whole concept of the “spoiler alert” exists because everyone knows that if you jump right to the end, it ruins the story.

That holds true in life also.

A lot of people sit around in their room and fantasize. “I’m gonna be married with two children and have a white picket fence. I’m gonna run my own company. I’m gonna win an Emmy.” Whatever the end of the dream is, people spend a lot of their time thinking about the last chapter, and the rest of their time thinking that they’re delusional.

But none of those outcomes are actually delusional. Every day people fall in love and buy new homes and start companies. Every year people win Emmys. The problem isn’t the dream. The problem is that you ruin the story if you skip to the last chapter.

Ask yourself, how will you win the Emmy? Tell yourself a good story about the path that got you there. A good story has ups and downs, trials and tribulations, epic failures and grand successes. A good story goes down unexpected paths. And most importantly, a good story is totally believable.

Instead of fantasizing about the day your new company corners the market, fantasize about overcoming the failures along the way that will make that last chapter all the sweeter. Instead of fantasizing about the dream collaborators you’re going to thank in your acceptance speech, fantasize about the guy who got in your way and how you cleverly got around him.

The most important chapter isn’t the last one, it’s the next one.

One of the things that made Jonathan’s incredibly prolific workflow even more amazing (that no one could know from the outside) is that we didn’t just deliver one version of the score for each episode of television. We delivered three or four choices for every piece of music. This might seem inefficient, but it isn’t, for two big reasons.

The first benefit was technical. It eliminated the need for approvals. The back and forth of sending music to the filmmakers to get their approval is a complicated and slow process. But if you show up on the day with multiple versions, with all of your bases covered, then you can skip that entire process of getting things approved. So when we delivered the episodes, we delivered with our first choice of music on the “Main track” and at least two other choices on alternative tracks called “Alt tracks.”

This practice also has a powerful artistic benefit. Forcing yourself to score the same scene over and over forces you to find different musical statements to make. You may put in a piece of music from one character’s perspective, and then another from a different character’s. You may try the scene with joyful music and then with something more restrained. You are forced to see the same story from multiple angles. I call it “filling your alt tracks”. When your alt tracks are full when the director says “I want to feel her sadness more in this moment,” you can say “That option is on Alt track 3.”

You should apply this exact same trick to your internal narrative. Don’t just pick your favorite version and keep telling yourself the same story over and over. Imagine lots of different versions of the next chapter. Fill your alt tracks.

As you keep mulling the next chapter over and over in your mind it changes. It becomes more believable. It becomes more focused, and you become more prepared to navigate the future no matter what happens. I may write the next chapter 10 different ways.

I will tell myself stories where it all works out, and stories where it fails. I will imagine versions where I navigate it well and versions where I mess it all up.Then, when things actually change or go sideways, I have the benefit of having thought through many different scenarios.

Your dreams are not a delusion. But the idea that you’re going to live your story from the last chapter backwards, that is, so dream about the next chapter and fill your alt tracks.

You have to know the next chapter in the story of how someday you are going to get your dream. What are the trials and tribulations that lie between right now and that last chapter you keep repeating in your mind? If you don’t know those, you don’t know the story. And if you don’t know the story, you can’t live it.

The preacher was in a state of constant suffering brought on by a brain tumor for which the doctor had no solution. In the prior scene, we had just seen the doctor on his knees, begging God to end the poor man’s suffering.

Throughout the doctor’s entire prayer, we played no music, letting the raw and visceral emotions of his desperate plea play out in silence. The music comes in only on his final words, “I beg you to relent, thy will be done.” Just a simple tone, a high note that composers Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil created to be something reminiscent of a church organ layered with an angelic choir. Just a tone that comes from that moment of prayer and continues as we watch this horrific murder. Just a single tone that turns Al, for a moment, from a villain to an angel of death.

One of the cool things about a well told narrative is that it doesn’t just tell us what the characters did. It tells us why. That’s where the old cliché about actors asking, “what’s my character’s motivation” comes from. Great storytellers know that you have to do more than just reveal the plot, you need to convey the characters’ intentions. We, as the audience, get to judge Al not by his actions but by his intentions. And we don’t just sympathize with the character who does the wrong thing for the right reason, we love him for it.

Twenty years later I’m working on Government Cheese, for Apple TV+ and a character pulls the opposite move.

Hampton, freshly out of prison, is attempting to rebuild his relationship with his family, but he needs money because he owes it to some bad people. So he agrees to do a heist, a terrible heist. He robs a synagogue. There is no ethical question, what he’s doing is bad. He is struggling morally with his choices but he has convinced himself, and subsequently the audience, that he is ultimately doing it all for his family.

In an attempt to reconnect with his son, he takes him camping, and from his son’s perspective this is a big father-son bonding moment. But Hampton sneaks away and commits the heist in the middle of the night and then sneaks back. It turns out the whole camping trip was just cover to establish an alibi for the heist.

He is doing the right thing by his family taking his son camping, but he’s doing it for the wrong reason, to establish an alibi. And when his son finds that out, it ruins it for him. And it ruins it for us the audience too. That’s the second half. We absolutely hate people who do the right thing for the wrong reason.

It’s easy to see how you can come to opposite conclusions when you judge someone by their actions and not by their intentions. This sets up a real mismatch because, unlike in fiction, in the real world we aren’t privy to other people’s intentions, only their actions. The only person’s intentions you truly have access to are your own. We are driven by our own intentions. They lead our actions, but we are stuck trying to guess others’ intentions after we see them act and after we have had our own emotional reactions to those actions.

As a result of this mismatch we can only really judge others by their actions and we can only really judge ourselves by our intentions.

So we’re stuck. We can’t judge people solely by their actions, fiction and experience teach us this often leads to opposite judgments than we would come to if we knew the whole story, so we simply imagine what their intentions are. But way too often we ascribe people worse intentions than the ones they actually have. It’s the cause of most conflicts, the same action leading to two different narratives.

Too often we are telling ourselves a story about another person that maybe isn’t exactly true. We carry resentment and anger that may not be how we would feel if we only knew why they did whatever it is they did.

The good news is fiction gives us the tools to solve this problem in reality. Just being the audience of good stories has given us all the practice at judging not only ourselves, but others by their intentions. Al wasn’t just freeing the doctor of his suffering, he was revealing a pathway to free ourselves from a lot of our suffering too. It’s an opportunity for us to practice being better storytellers to ourselves.

When you find yourself in conflict, or surprised by what you imagine to be someone else’s bad behavior, imagine a story in which their intentions are pure. Are you sure that’s not true?

Imagine a story in which they had no choice. Are you sure that’s not true?

The truth is you can’t ever truly know what someone else’s intentions are, but you have an infinite number of stories you can imagine. You can ascribe them whatever intentions you want in your mind. Practice being an overly generous storyteller here. Imagine a scenario where they are the hero for taking this seemingly bad action. Are you sure that’s not true?

The first benefit of this way of thinking is to you and it is immediate. You get to be happier in that moment, freeing yourself of the negative feelings that you feel towards someone, which may or may not be justified and replacing them with one that feels good, empathy. But there is a second hidden benefit.

Sometimes people actually do have bad intentions and act badly as a result. We have all regretted something we did or said after we did or said it. Often in that scenario, we feel like there is no way out. We did a bad thing and have no way to justify it, even to ourselves.

But when someone gives you a better way to think about the bad actions, you’ll take that off ramp that redeems you. The simple act of imagining someone being a better actor than they actually are gives them a pathway to walk down where they become that better actor. The really cool thing is that trick not only works on others. It works on ourselves.

One of the final steps in making a movie or television show is what we call the final mix, or the final dub. Music editors like myself aren’t the only sound editors required to make a TV show or a film. There are six general categories of sound:

Production dialogue, which is the sound they record on the set the day they shoot. They use very “directional” microphones and try to only get the sound of the actors speaking.

Sound effects, which are all the sounds of all of the specific objects on screen like cars and guns and doors and spaceships.

Background sounds, which are the environmental sounds that let you know where you are like wind, crickets, humming lightbulbs, basically anything that sets the scene but doesn’t react to specific objects.

ADR, which stands for “automated dialogue replacement,” and is dialogue recorded after the fact by the actors in a recording studio.

Foley, which are all the sounds made by the people on screen with anything other than their mouths like footsteps, hands touching things and picking things up and putting things down, even clothes rustling (pay attention to how loud your clothes are when you move).

And, of course, music. Each one of these categories has its own editor.

The final dub is where all of the editors bring our edited material to a mixing stage, which is basically a small theater, and re-recording mixers mix all of those sounds together to make the final soundtrack of the movie or TV show. At the end of that process, the filmmakers come to the mixing stage and we do a final playback of the mix. The filmmakers give notes, and all of the sound editors and mixers scramble to change the mix to those notes.

So today I was in a playback, and two of the producers had notes about the same sound effect. What might seem odd but is actually really common, one of them thought it was too loud, and one of them thought it was too quiet. So we did what we always do in that situation. We said, “Oh well, if you thought it was too loud and I thought it was too quiet, then it’s probably just right.”

But maybe that’s a mistake.

We have this “Goldilocks principle”: that there exists a perfect balance. Not too hot, not too cold. Not too hard, not too soft. In every situation where we’re trying to weigh two or more options, somewhere in the middle is a perfect balance.

While this may be true for measurable metrics, it is not true for any endeavor which is creative, or hinges on people’s emotional reactions, which I would say is almost every single human endeavor.

For those cases, there is what I call “the range of taste.”

Let’s say the range of acceptable answers to a problem lies on a scale from 0 to 100. Below 0 is a mistake. Above 100 is a mistake. Everything else from 0 to 100 is just taste.

In most endeavors, for most people, our choices cluster around 50. But people actively engaged in positive creative thinking, or people trying to make something new tend to cluster around 25 and 75, rather than at the safe middle. That’s what makes their choices interesting and unexpected.

The obvious answer is the answer that lies at 50 in the range of taste. And that’s not what makes artists artists. That’s not what makes creativity creativity. The most interesting answers will always still lie within the range of taste, but at the edges. The sound effect is probably wrong. It needs to be louder, OR it needs to be quieter. The compromise might be the wrong answer. Louder and quieter might both be right answers.

This is often what makes collaborating hard. Two creative professionals can find themselves in a room discussing a creative decision where one’s taste is a 25 and the other’s is a 75. Both are well within the acceptable range, equidistant from the middle. But they’re so far apart from each other that each one’s taste is 25 points closer to a mistake than it is to their colleague’s.

It’s very hard, in that situation, not to see the other person’s taste as a mistake.

As a music editor, it’s my job to align myself with the taste of the showrunner, the producers, the director, the composer, while still having my own opinions and artistic taste. And let me tell you, it’s a very different job, helping other people realize their artistic vision versus realizing your own.

Sometimes someone’s idea is actually a mistake, a technical mistake, and in those cases, I try to make sure people can realize their ideas without making technical errors. So my job is to have an opinion, and then ultimately do whatever the producer or director wants. My job is to protect them from stepping outside of the bounds of right and wrong, but not to protect them from the giant gap that often exists between my taste and their taste.

I can’t possibly execute in good faith a note from someone whose taste is a 90 when my taste is a 10, unless I can fully internalize the fact that while they are 80 points from what feels right to me, 10 points away from a mistake is well within the acceptable range of taste. And that requires me to try and actually see it from their perspective. I can’t just acknowledge that they like it and I hate it, I have to feel what they like about it. I have to execute the best version of their instincts. I have to deliver like someone who understands the vision. I have to get it.

Always stop and honestly ask yourself: is this a mistake or is this a question of taste? If it’s taste (and it almost always is), then recognize that if you’re good at your job, you’re not anywhere near 50, and they probably aren’t either. That means you’re not wrong, AND they’re not wrong.

It may seem like I’m just asking you to see it from someone’s perspective. It’s not the same as seeing it from someone’s perspective. It’s feeling it from someone else’s perspective. And that’s a lot harder to do.

Fight like hell for your taste, but not until you fully understand why the other person likes what they like about it. It’s not enough just to understand their viewpoint. The secret of true collaboration is understanding the emotions that got them there.

As a music editor, I manipulate a very specific part of the narrative for a living, the emotional journey. It’s not my job to worry about the words or the plot. It’s my job to pay close attention to what every moment feels like, and ultimately to try and control the way the audience feels.

That piano note that makes you feel sympathy for the victim, I can move it a few seconds earlier and make you feel sympathy for the killer. Subtle changes in timing, tone, and emphasis change how a story lands. And I’m here to tell you that the most important story you’re working on isn’t the one you tell your audience. It’s the one you tell yourself. And you’re probably editing it badly. I know, because I was too.

In the mid-2000s I was working on the TV show “Cold Case.” Every episode we would solve an old unsolved mystery from the past. It was a particularly fun job because when we flashed back to the year of the crime, we would use popular music from that year so I got to edit a lot of really fun songs from a lot of different eras, and that music was a big part of the show. Intermingled with that, the brilliant prolific composer Michael Levine was writing new themes every week because there were new characters and new timelines. It was a really complicated show with a lot of music.

I got up every day and I worked on that music all day long. At night I was done, my ears were tired. My brain was tired of thinking about music. I wasn’t making music anymore. I wasn’t really even listening to music anymore. Music had become work.

I was driving home from a “Cold Case” mixing session one day and when I turned on the car radio, a song I didn’t recognize came on. I had just gotten my first radio that showed you the name of the song and the artist on the display, so I glanced down and saw it was a Britney Spears song (I can’t remember which one). I had never heard that song before, but I recognized the title, and I knew it was a hit. I thought, “I’m going to listen to this and see what it is that people like about it, because it’s my job to know popular music.”

So I’m listening, trying to find something to like, and after about thirty seconds I thought, “OK, I get it. I’m getting bored now.” So I switched the station.

As soon as I switched the station, I hear the first lyric from Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender”:

“I’m gonna rent myself a house in the shade of the freeway…”

It was so perfectly timed that if one of my apprentice music editors had edited it into a scene like that, I would have rejected it as forced, unnatural, too perfect. I pushed the button and boom, Jackson Browne starts singing the first lyric.

At that moment when Britney Spears turned into Jackson Browne, it occurred to me what the difference was between them, and it wasn’t any of the things I had learned in music school. They both were singing in tune. They both were singing in time. They were both doing their jobs at the highest level, but I suddenly realized that they were doing different jobs.

It wasn’t about how, or even what they were singing. It was about why. Britney Spears was a pop star, a performer. She wants you to watch her dance and sing and put on a show. She has co-writers and producers and stylists and managers and dozens of other people behind her music. Sure, she was the face of it, but she was just a part of a big production machine put together to sell albums. And that is why she was singing.

But Jackson Browne is a story teller. What I suddenly noticed was that he was using many of the same subtle tools I was using to take you on an emotional journey. He had something he wanted me to think about, something he wanted me to feel and that was why he was singing.

The very next thought I had, after I realized the only difference that mattered was intent, was, “Oh my God…I’ve become Britney Spears.”

It occurred to me that I was doing music for money. Not even my own music. And all of the reasons I became a musician, all of the things I loved about it that drove me towards it, had nothing to do with what I was doing all day long.

It threw me into a pretty deep depression. I mean, I had actually done it. I had built a career working as a musician, making decent money using my musical skills all day every day. And all the while the knob of musical integrity turned down slowly and slowly and slowly until it clicked off, and I never noticed until that moment.

After a few days of wallowing and sadness, I sat at the piano and forced myself to write a song. And that’s when “Feel Lucky” was written. In one session. It just flowed out of me and it was like a switch had been flipped back on. My relationship to being a musician was restored, a relationship I didn’t even realize was in crisis.

And yet, it took me 20 years to put out an album and finally release that song.

I think about all the different phases of myself as a musician. The young kid in college playing in bands. The few years I told myself I was a film composer. All the years building a music editing career.

The week before I wrote that song, I was telling myself I’d made it. I’m a professional musician. Then I had a thought, something changed my narrative, and I was telling myself it’s all a lie. You’re not a musician.

Then I wrote a song and it changed my narrative and I told myself you’re back, you’ve got it all. And then it took me 20 years to put that song out because through that whole time while I was winning awards and climbing up in the industry, I didn’t really believe I was good enough. I always had a thousand reasons in my head why I wasn’t an artist worthy of having a solo career. It just took me 20 years to tell myself the story that I was ready.

The hard thing for me to accept is that the song I finally put out is exactly the same as the night I wrote it. Nothing changed about the song. What changed was my courage. What changed was the story I was telling myself.

What I’ve come to learn is that we all tell ourselves stories about who we are, and then we go about our lives living out those narratives. If you want to change your behaviors and you want to change your life, what you have to change is the story you tell yourself and you have to believe that new story as much as the one you believe right now.

It’s not easy to do. That’s why it’s important to understand what makes a story believable, what makes a story complete. You can’t lie to yourself. But you can tell yourself a different, just as true story about who you are and what you can do. You can accomplish way more than you’re telling yourself right now. You just have to learn how to be a better storyteller to yourself.

You can listen to “Feel Lucky” and the rest of my debut album Whole New Sun by Micha Meir (I use my middle name and not my last) wherever you stream music.

Now, both guitar and clarinet are what we call “transposing instruments.” That means that for some insane reason, they don’t actually play the note you write on the sheet music. Guitar plays an octave lower than written and just to make it harder on the guy who has to prepare all of the music, clarinet plays in a completely different key than what you write. You write a C, it plays B-flat. With roughly 100 charts to transpose across two instruments, I did what I do best, I automated it. I wrote macros to do it automatically. Pretty cutting edge for 1995.

Somewhere after 2 AM the night before the session, while I’m grinding through all these charts, I accidentally started hitting the keystroke for the clarinet transposition on some of the guitar charts. So some of George’s charts were now in the wrong octave and the wrong key.

Now, with a normal session player, a normal human being, here’s how this goes down. We press record on the first cue with the wrong chart. He plays insanely wrong notes in the wrong key and the wrong octave. We quickly figure out my error. Then one of two things happens: either we take a break and I reprint all the charts properly, or the musician says “don’t worry, I can transpose it in my head,” at which point David would have said “No, let’s reprint the charts, I don’t want your mental energy going to that, I want your mental energy going to playing well.” At least I assume that’s what David would’ve said since that’s what any great producer would say, and David is a great producer.

But that’s not how it played out at all.

What happened was the session ended. Everything was perfect. Not a single bad note played.

Afterward, George pulled me aside and whispered in my ear (because he didn’t want to embarrass me.) He said he knew we’d had Bob in that morning. When we pressed record on the first chart that was printed wrong, between the time the first note of the track played and the time he had to play his first guitar note, he heard it coming in a different key than what was on his page. Knowing that Bob had been there earlier he instantly assumed he had gotten charts written for clarinet and transposed it in his head before he ever played a wrong note.

It was the first time I ever met a musician who was a superhuman.

Almost thirty years later I am sitting in front of a much more advanced computer looking at my session for “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” this tongue-twisting patter song written by Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Benj Pasek, and Justin Paul for Season 3 of “Only Murders in the Building.” Steve Martin’s character had been struggling to master it all season, and the payoff was his big performance in Episode 8, “Sitzprobe.”

Now in a normal musical, when the music starts and everyone starts singing as the produced music track appears, the background sounds in the film disappear. The singing and dancing transport the audience to magical “music land”, and no one in the audience for one second thinks we’re watching something real. In music land, everything is magical and different.

But this was not actually a musical. This was a TV show about people putting on a musical. So when they were on stage singing, you had to fully believe that they were on stage singing it live. It had to look and feel real.

This got really complicated when the producers decided that for the patter song, we were going to do a montage with multiple images on the screen at the same time. The audience was going to see one take of Steve Martin’s face on camera for every single word of the song.

A normal part of music production is something we call “comping” (I think it’s short for compositing) where a music editor goes through all of the different takes that were made during the recording session and chooses the best word or line or even best part of each word to assemble a final master take that has the best performance for every moment in the song.

We had lots of takes of Steve singing the song, takes from beforehand in the recording studio, and takes from the set when he re-recorded it live every take while they were shooting.

So in addition to doing the normal comping where every single word is chosen from the best take, meticulously tuned to be perfect, and sonically matched to sound like one seamless take, each syllable also had to be time-stretched, edited, or manipulated to land perfectly in Steve’s mouth so that the audience believes they are watching that one take happen in real time. Every word. Every syllable taken from all various takes synced to his lips to create a single perfect take visible for the entire montage.

This took me almost a month.

I guess I was so effective at it that nobody knew. And when I say nobody knew, I mean Marc Shaiman, the co-composer of that song told me he had been telling everyone that it actually was one take. Because he believed it was. He didn’t find out the truth until I accidentally bumped into him at the Emmys and told him.

When artistry rescues engineering, we don’t hesitate. George Doering is a genius. Superhuman. We all know we should celebrate that instinctively.

But when engineering rescues artistry, something shifts. Think about how it feels when you find out an artist is using Auto-Tune. Our gut reaction is to feel cheated, the technology is a crutch, compensating for a deficit. Nobody admires that.

George’s superhuman artistry absorbed my technical mistake so completely that no one knew anything had gone wrong. Three decades later, my engineering made Steve Martin’s performance look so effortless that even the composer of the song believed he was watching a single live take.

But the Pickwick Triplets story isn’t about fixing something broken. Steve Martin is a gifted musician. Every single take he did had something great in it. It’s about a monumental engineering effort that created the illusion of a perfect live moment. To the contrary, George was compensating for something. My charts were wrong.

When artistry rescues engineering, we call it genius. When engineering rescues artistry, we call it cheating. Why?

George used his musical abilities to engineer the solution to a problem. I used my engineering abilities to create something beautiful that didn’t exist before.

I’ve spent my life working at the intersection of these two things, sitting in a chair that is equal parts musician and audio engineer. For so long, I thought my job was special because it blurred the line between what is a technical achievement and what is an artistic one until one day I realized the line between artist and engineer was never real.

The first thing I noticed when I took my first blacksmithing class (a story for a future Substack) was that blacksmithing was a trade and now it’s an art. Nothing changed about swinging the hammer or heating the metal. What changed was the way we think about it. What changed was the story we tell ourselves about it. And that story, like many of our internal narratives, is not only untrue, it holds us back.

Half of us have been convinced that we’re not creative, and half of us have been convinced that we’re not technical thinkers. It’s a false dichotomy. It’s a story we’ve been told that we just don’t question. But the line was never real. You are both an artist and an engineer. We all are.

But every time I got there and was about to do it, I realized that they don’t care if I do. They don’t care who sweeps the cigarette butts out of their parking lot. There are a thousand struggling composers ready to take my place. And if I quit, then I’m just a telemarketer, and why did I even move to L.A. in the first place?

It was 1995. I was fresh out of college. My mom had a friend Barry who was a working film composer who had just signed a deal with some tech company I had never heard of. Apparently, there was this brand new technology called CD-ROM and it was going to replace televisions and movies and everything, and he was in on the ground floor. Once the entire entertainment industry went CD-ROM, there would be more music to write than he could ever handle. I should just move to LA, he could give me infinite work.

I let him know the day I arrived. A week later, he called me and asked if I could engineer a recording session at two in the morning, which I did. And then I never heard from him again.

Through an ad in the trades, I had gotten an internship at Remote Control, Hans Zimmer’s studio. What that meant was I got to pick up their sushi orders, serve it, and then do the dishes and in exchange, they got to not pay me anything. These kinds of unpaid internships were the norm in Hollywood back then...before they were made illegal. I quickly ran out of money and got a job selling long distance over the phone. So, I split my days. In the mornings I would fail at selling long distance phone services in Hollywood (in my entire time there I made exactly zero sales) and then in the afternoon I would drive across town to Santa Monica to do my unpaid internship until evening. I was working two full-time jobs, making no money, and not moving my career forward at all.

There was one other composer, Trevor, who worked with me at the telemarketing job. He was getting his masters in composition at UCLA. He mentioned in the break room that he’d applied for (and not gotten) a job the day before, being an assistant to David Schwartz, the composer from Northern Exposure! He said the job was too technical for him and knowing I had studied audio engineering as well as music he suggested maybe I should apply. He said he’d bring me David’s number the next day.

When I got home that evening I could not stop thinking about it. So I opened up the phone book. There were five David Schwartzes in there.

I called the first one. “Hi, is this David Schwartz?” “Yes.” “Are you looking for a composer’s assistant?” “A what?!?” Sorry, wrong number.

Called the next guy. “Hi, is this David Schwartz?” “Yes.” “Are you looking for a composer’s assistant?” “A who?!?” Sorry, wrong number.

Third David Schwartz...Same thing.

On the fourth try, I got the right David Schwartz. I told him I was a friend of Trevor’s and that he thought I might be the right candidate for the job, so I went down to David’s studio and interviewed. At the end of the interview, David told me he liked me, and it was down to me and two other candidates. He explained that the relationship between a composer and their assistant is a very personal one so the way he was going to decide was to have each of us come in and work for a day. I took a day off of work and spent a day being David’s assistant. So did the other two candidates.

A couple of days later, David calls and says he still can’t decide. Could I do one more day? I was really impressed with David. He is a brilliant composer who had an amazing studio and it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to be his assistant so, of course, I said yes. It took me a minute to arrange another day off of work so by the time I did my second audition day the other two candidates had already done theirs. I thought it went pretty well. At the end of that second day, he says, “Each of the three of you has worked two days for me and that decision moment still hasn’t landed for me. You all have your strengths and your weaknesses.” Then he timidly asked, “Would it be horrible if I asked for one more day?”

At that moment I had a realization. David had been telling himself there was going to be this magic moment when the right assistant would do something or say something and then he would just know. But that moment wasn’t coming. We all had our strengths. We all had our weaknesses, and I could tell by the way he asked that we both knew a third day probably wasn’t going to change that.

So I took a risk and said, “You know, I already took two days off of work and I’m sure the other two candidates did too. It’s a little unfair to keep three people’s lives in the balance for so long, and we both know that you’re not going to learn anything new on the third day. If you make the wrong choice, I’m sure it will be obvious quickly to you and to your new assistant. And I’m sure I speak for the other two candidates when I say that the other two of us will gladly come back later if you have to change your mind. It really is a low risk choice for you. So just decide now. You can change your mind later.”

He looked at me for a few seconds and said, “You’re hired. I’ll see you in the morning.”

When I showed up in the morning, the very first thing he did was show me how to access the company checkbook and have me pay the other two candidates for the time they’d spent working for him. He wasn’t stringing anyone along. He was an ethical guy who was honestly struggling to make a choice because he was telling himself the wrong story about how he was going to find his next assistant.

That was the job that launched it all for me. And after three decades, an Emmy win and three more nominations, I know that those few seconds that David paused before he made his decision were amongst the most pivotal seconds in my life.

But here’s the thing. That pivotal moment in my career didn’t turn in my favor because I showed some technical engineering prowess. It wasn’t a moment of musical genius that launched my career. It was honestly expressing my feelings that let David trust the decision he’d already made. Nothing changed in those few pivotal seconds except the story that David was telling himself.

That was the first of many lessons David taught me. Looking back, I’ve come to realize that the most important stories we tell are not the ones we tell the audience. After a career of learning to tell stories at the highest level, I’ve learned that the stories we tell ourselves are the ones that really matter.

I plan for this Substack, to be an exploration into the power of narrative and how it affects our everyday lives. I would be thrilled if you would join me in that journey. So please subscribe, there is much more to come.