02/10/2026
Sixteen years ago today, I gave a TED Talk that changed my life. I was twenty-two, delivering this speech before a roomful of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, artists and filmmakers—some of them later friends and funders who encouraged me to launch Street Symphony, an organization dedicated to making music for more people like Nathaniel Ayers, the subject of my talk and the subject of the book and movie The Soloist, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx. This talk also launched me into a life as a professional speaker, and over the last sixteen years, I’ve been lucky enough to share the power of music with communities, companies, and campuses all over the world.
But the truth is, I’ve never been able to watch this talk all the way through. Even now, even while creating this post, I’ve cringed at how cocky and sure I seem, how much I needed myself to believe the words I was saying, how hard I was looking for the standing ovation I got at the end, how hard I was trying at everything: to be good, to be loved, to be enough.
I wish I had said more in that talk about how, when I started playing for Nathaniel backstage at Disney Hall and he began having a manic episode, part of me knew exactly what to do. I wish I had been brave enough during that talk to say that I had grown up around instability and turbulence, how there was rarely a moment of peace or quiet in the chaos of a demanding, often violent family life—and that always, my solution, ever since I had been a small child, was to put my head down and play the violin. And so, when Nathaniel scared me—by talking about chlorine gas and setting his Skid Row bedroom on fire—all I did was what felt completely and totally natural to me: to play Beethoven.
Nathaniel became my guide to Skid Row, one of my life’s greatest teachers. Because of him, I started looking for more people like him. I thought there might be hundreds, if not thousands, of Nathaniels living in LA. I told myself that I wanted to find more people like him—people living in shelters and clinics and county jails and state hospitals—people grappling with the untold horrors of poverty and incarceration and homelessness. People I saw as “the other.” People I thought I could help.
But in searching for the thousands of Nathaniels, I actually encountered thousands of “my-selves”: thousands of talented, aching, dedicated musicians who wanted to find a sense of meaning through their art. Musicians who knew that music was more than entertainment, who knew that music could be a lifeline of connection, belonging, and hope. And it was those musicians—from Skid Row and Disney Hall and the world in between those irreconcilable poles of society—who became my new family, my friends, my lifelines, who taught me how to restring myself and how to begin again.
This is the reason I wrote my book Restrung: that in trying to make something beautiful happen for other people, we find what we have been looking for for ourselves.
