The Language Beneath the Language: Music and a Return to You

Ever cried at a song you were only watching through a screen and wondered why your whole body answered? We open up about music that bypasses the mind and goes straight to the nervous system. How a single swell or perfectly timed harmony can unlock grief, summon joy, or calm a storm you don’t have words for. 

From a theater packed with strangers singing along to Twenty One Pilots to an 18-minute short film where barroom voices reveal entire lives, we trace how melody becomes meaning and performance becomes transformation.

We share the night we took our son to see Eric Clapton and left as different people, not because of celebrity, but because of mastery that made the air feel charged. We talk about Victor Wooten’s powerful idea that children are not beginners at music; they’ve been playing with it longer than they’ve been speaking in full sentences. That flips the script: theory is useful, but the human is the instrument. The guitars on the wall are silent until we pick them up. In a world leaning hard into screens and AI, that reminder matters. Music helps us return to ourselves when attention feels fractured and connection gets outsourced to feeds.

You’ll hear practical ways to use sound on purpose. 

-Build a three-song loop to reset before a social stretch. 
-Create one playlist that centers you and another that sparks energy for movement or work. Notice how you feel thirty minutes later, because songs linger like waves. 

We also get candid about the other edge: when looping heartbreak anthems keeps you stuck or when high-agitation tracks quietly fray your focus. Curating your soundtrack is curating your state.

If a track brings surprise tears or fills your chest with warmth you can’t name, let it happen and enjoy experiencing being fully alive.

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Transcript

From Concert Film To Theme

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to We Playful Out with Barton Sonny Miller. Take it away, Sonny.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

We are a little bit late tonight because we went to a movie theater and we watched 21 Pilots, which I thought was going to be more of a kind of documentary style, I don't know, documentary, I guess. But we actually watched the Clancy World Tour concert basically for the third time, only this time was on a movie screen, which I still highly enjoyed.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Yeah, it was great.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Everybody in the theater's kind of clapping and singing along, and it was it was lots of fun. But the reason I bring this up is because we are actually going to be talking about something very near and dear to my heart, which is music.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

That's awesome. Super excited about this thing.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Yes, and I know that it's near and dear to yours as well.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

For sure.

When Music Triggers Deep Emotion

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Yes. So imagine my surprise when I was watching a YouTube video of a song being played at a music festival, and suddenly I found myself just crying in the middle of the song. And I'm not talking about a cute little, you know, little tiny tears streaming down my cheeks, pleasant kind of way. It was like an all-out, full-on sob fest, complete with shoulders shaking and probably some wailing in there in between. Now, this is just a song that I'm watching on YouTube. Wasn't even live. And I'm like, what in the world just happened to me? And you know, probably if you're listening, because it would be my first thought would be like, well, the lyrics must have been really sad and brought out memories of something that was painful or you know, from the past. For me, that was not the case. Something about the tone, the build, and the mastery of sound and instrument all combining together at a particular moment simply caused a massive release of emotion for me. You ever had this happen?

SPEAKER_00 1:56

I have it happening. Maybe not to that extent. I have it happen in different ways. There's just different songs, different melodies, different whatever that sometimes it just hits me all through my entire body, you know, causes a reaction. And I think that's what I love so much about music, you know, and certain voices and certain everything, you know, that just yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Yeah, and I know in those times you kind of look at me, but you you know me so well. So you just kind of look at me with your all-knowing eyes, like, are you okay? And when I try to explain to you all of the reasons why it happened, like I just don't have words for it, but you completely get it, which I super appreciate that about you. So there's I'm sure that you've heard this saying, it's pretty common where words fail, music speaks. And does that not ring true?

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

So music has a way of allowing emotions to move, express, and resolve without naming words. It's a safe container for things like grief, joy, rage, and love.

unknown 3:00

Yeah.

The Universal Language Of Song

SPEAKER_00 3:00

It's it's very powerful. And the way you're saying it, I think, you know, to even take it from my opinion, like I'll never forget being in Asia and Japan particularly, and you know, walking by a court karaoke bar and listening to these Japanese sing perfect English to a song that I can't tell you that they totally understood.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Yeah, when you say perfect English, you're saying there's no Japanese accent in there. Like they sound like English speakers, correct?

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Yeah, exactly. You know, it's kind of like uh Celine Dion, obviously, French, right? But when she's anyway, it's just it just really blows my mind. And even with the show we went to tonight, where was it held? Mexico City. Everything, one thing in Spanish, and they were all singing along like they knew it, like it was part of them. And I think music brings us together not only worldwide, but in community in everything. And I think it's a beautiful thing we're talking about because you know, tribes, different people, different everything have some sort of music that I think ties them together as humanity.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Yeah, it's kind of funny you said that because when we were leaving the theater, I was like, all of these people should be my besties. Like, why have we not like met anybody or talked to people? Because obviously, if they love 21 Pilots, they should be my friend.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Right. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

But like you said, it's like a community, and you know, a lot of tribes do have certain music they they uh they know and they have ritual and they have ceremony, but a lot of it has to do with music and sound and the way they they use that.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Absolutely.

Heartbreak, Resonance, And Relief

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Now, I'm sure that all of us as humans have had the experience of having their hearts broken in those painful moments. You know, don't we turn to music? Yeah, we turn on those sad, lost love songs, and they seem to strike something inside of us that kind of vibrates that emotional resonance throughout our whole bodies like a plucked guitar string. And in a way, it's soothing to us. It's like it it matches the experience that we're having. Yeah, I really feel like to feel deeply when music pulls at us, grounds us into our very nature as human beings. Yeah, there's something raw and real inside of us that is just laid bare when music speaks to the depth of our emotions.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Yeah, amazing.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

Um, last year we took Xander, our son, to see Eric Clapton in concert. How is that experience for you?

SPEAKER_00 5:35

You know, I have to say, I didn't expect what I got. Um, I went there to support him. I, you know, I've heard Eric Clapton play, but to watch that in person is one of the highlights of my life. There is no doubt. It it absolutely not only inspired me, it moved me, it yeah, it just I can I can't put words to what that was like for me. And uh it was it was absolutely incredible for sure.

Live Mastery And Transformation

SPEAKER_01 6:11

I completely agree with you, and you know, Clapton for sure, but even his organ player. Oh, I mean all the musicians, all the musicians, but it was so interesting how just different parts of myself could just feel like such depth touched when they would bring their mastery to the stage. Yeah, and I'm with you. I don't really have great words for it other than I would say we left different than when we showed up. Like there was a transformation that happened. And I I am getting to something here. Uh the other day I turned a short film on Netflix. It was 18 minutes long, and it's called The Singers. And the opening scene is set inside a bar where the men are just sitting there drinking and they're carrying on, and one guy's like, Hey, I'm the best singer in the bar, basically. And the bartender is like, oh no, you can't be, because there's this guy sitting here, and he used to sing in here, and he has the best voice ever. And you know, the camera pans to this older gentleman, he's got oxygen tubes in his nose, and he just looks rough, like almost like a sailor who's come back from the sea and has been really beat up by it, type of thing. Well, a bet starts. The bartender offers the best singer$100 and a free beer, and this turns into a total impromptu sing-off there at the bar. And the first guy to kind of open his mouth was not one of the guys that should have been singing, like he was he's the jokester, you know. The bartender convinces the old gentleman with this hundred dollars and a free beer to start to sing, and he opened his mouth and you felt every word of what he was singing. And then the next guy went, and then the next guy went. And and what really happened, and really just I guess made me want to talk about this part today, is because it's just so raw and real watching them sing, they were like dripping with this rawness of human emotion and their life lived. Yeah, like you didn't need to hear their life story to know what they had experienced. Yeah, there's just so much human in that to me. And you know, throughout our podcasts, and all the topics that we cover is really come back to you, yeah, wake up, be human, and with the shift of like technology and AI and all this, and we'll talk about this a little later, but it seems like the greater call and the greater pull then becomes who am I? Yeah, and what does it mean to be here in this experience right now?

Raw Humanity In “The Singers”

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Yeah, and that that reminds me of something we've talked about before around music. And you know, I've you and I both have had the privilege of traveling the world, and we've seen a lot of things, and it always amazes me. It doesn't matter if I go to the most wealthy place or a bum, I would say, you know, if that's the right term, on the streets that has a guitar and sits there and just starting singing how they can transform somebody. Or yeah, you can be at the most expensive diner ever, and somebody playing can transform, you know. It just music is such a language that's universal that it's just so beautiful, and it's everywhere in the world from every economic standpoint, even down to people playing trash cans that make you go, Wow, that was so freaking cool.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Yeah, for sure. It's and so it's universal, and I I like to kind of almost think of it as the language beneath our language.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Yeah. Well, it is a rhythm, and I think everything in life has a rhythm, an ebb, and a flow, and you know, I want to make sure that everybody's really enjoying this, but I think there's just so much that if you just sit and think about your favorite song, and like Sonny said, you know, bring all these emotions. And I'll share one little thing. I was uh was we was at a Paul Mitchell event, and John Paul DeGiorio brought up the reason he doesn't play any regular music in his like mainstream music in his salons was because some when somebody's in your personal space, you didn't want them to have a breakdown or a a memory or something that brought up an emotional thing in that chair with somebody else. And I was like, wow, I'd never thought about that. But imagine you know, you're sitting there getting your hair cut and all of a sudden the song that you broke up to comes on. What is that gonna do to the whole experience? And then I think about Starbucks and how much music and how they were making superstars off of music selling at Starbucks, and then I think about a TikTok song that goes viral and just you know, it just it's just fascinating how it just ebbs and flows all throughout the world in different ways.

Music As Identity In A Tech World

SPEAKER_01 10:47

Yeah. So a friend of ours, Den Lopez, recently shared a podcast with us. Victor Wooten, he's a world-renowned, five-time Grammy-winning electric bassist producer and author. He was the man being interviewed, and he has some really profound things to say about music and the way he looked at a lot of things. But I just wanted to share one of them because I had never thought about this. He said, Do you realize that by the time a child is 10 years old, that child has been playing music for 11 years? They are not beginners. I was like, Well, wait a minute, because as a musician, you kind of get hung up on the idea of music theory. And in order to play music, you have to know theory or at least notes. And he says, No, that's backwards. Um kids can learn to sing, like even Lila knows songs that she can sing. She's one, a little over one, and she can sing along with some stuff with her mom. So even kids can sing popular songs, they can dance to them, and I I would say when they're playing music, they're playing with music. Yeah, they really are. They don't know what the key of C is, how to play a major scale, or understand uh voicings, but they don't have to. Yeah, they can sing a song in the key of C without knowing it's in the key of C, just like a child doesn't have to know how to spell milk in order to understand what it is.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Yeah, I thought it was so beautiful when I heard that. And yeah, if you guys haven't watched this, I would really, really, really, really, did I say really, encourage you to go watch it. It's yes, it's music, but it is very transformative in how he speaks about it and what it does, and such a humble man. I thought it was really, really, really good.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

Yeah, so he said we try to again learn music backwards. So, like, think about learning how to speak English. You don't have to know what a noun is, an adverb is a participle or any of those things to actually speak English. We learn it after the fact. That's right. And so music is innate in us, and we are the fascinating thing is like looking at our walls. We're sitting in here in in my in our office and the music room. We have instruments all over the walls, but none of them are playing music right now. They're silent until we pick them up because we are the music. Yeah, I thought that was so beautiful to think. No, like there's something instinctual in humanity that like calls us to bring this stuff out into the world. The instruments can't do it themselves.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

That's right.

We Are The Music, Not The Gear

SPEAKER_01 13:24

So, again, our world is like leaning heavily into technology to speed that has been leaving a lot of us feeling quite dizzy. We were talking the other day about AI and about all the things that are coming up, and it's almost like we're running as fast as we can knowing we're not gonna catch up. Yeah, screens have quietly become the things we look at and talk to the most throughout our days. You think about all the time we've spent looking at screens, working on screens, talking to people on screens. Like they've they've really kind of become I don't know, the number one thing we do. We're experiencing less human contact with each other and connecting with others and especially ourselves is becoming something we have to work harder and harder to choose. The irony is we will sit and watch a TikTok video about how to have hard conversations, then we'll scroll to the next one and to the next one, and then we never actually have the conversation. Yeah, but music has the power to cut through all of that and bring us back to ourselves. And you talked about this with uh John Paul DeJorio. Music is the language beneath our language, it activates instinctual memory and bypasses the mind to speak directly to our nervous systems. Stories do that as well.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

So does music.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

Well, music usually is a story.

Calming, Energizing, Recalibrating

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Yep. It really is. Even if there's no lyrics, you kind of feel that there's a story moving through it. You've probably noticed this when music has evoked an emotion, a memory, or even an altered state. I've noticed that certain songs calm me instantly and others do agitate me. We were talking about this. Uh, we hosted an event a little while ago. And I guess, yes, I will label myself kind of as an introvert, meaning that I kind of need time to recharge. But I discovered that if I could just go be alone long enough to listen to a specific song like three times in a row, I felt like I was recalibrated. Like it put me back together and I was able to go back and be present and have fun. Because I love people. It's not that. But sometimes, like anyway, what I'm trying to say is music is the tool that helped me find my center again and be able to go out. So music can do that. There's days when I'm like, you're like, want to go play pickleball tonight? I'm like, oh, I'm too tired, like I can hardly move. But if we turn our pickleball playlist on, all of a sudden I have the energy and I'm ready and I'm excited to go.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Do you have anything like that?

SPEAKER_00 16:04

You know, I I do. Uh there's, I mean, there's all sorts of things. Like I, when I'm thinking about you, sometimes I put on certain music or whatever, you know. So I think there's, you know, things that I have. I haven't sat and really thought about all these different moments, but for sure, when I'm lifting weights, I want rock and roll. I want that power, I want that energy, you know. When I was riding a bike a lot, I wanted certain tempos that helped me get down the road faster, you know. So most definitely has changed my life. And uh I do love music.

The Double-Edged Power Of Playlists

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Yeah, so again, like it can calm nervous systems, it can instantly change our emotional states. It's it's a beautiful tool. But we need to also be aware that there's the flip side to that. Music can just as easily keep us stuck in depression or less than ideal emotional states. Going back to that story about turning on our sad lost love songs, if we play them for too long and stay in that music too long, it will actually keep us in that depressed state. Music can also stoke the fires of anger. It can normalize things that should disturb us or quietly destabilize our nervous systems. Music carries emotion the way a wave carries energy. And that wave doesn't just pass through you, it does linger. So over time, if you have repeated exposure to certain tones and messages of despair, violence, or self-negation, they can actually shape the way you think and feel. So the playlist you return to every day is doing something to you. The question is what? Yes, to you or for you. So as you play flood in your life this week, we invite you to become intentional about the soundtrack of your life. Notice what music you reach for and how it leaves you feeling, not just in the moment, but after. Take the time to curate a playlist that either calms your nervous system or puts you in an emotional state that you really enjoy being in. And let music be a tool for returning to yourself, not escaping yourself.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

Yeah, so good.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

And I would say the next time a song moves you to unexpected tears or fills your chest with something you can't quite name, love every minute of it because that is you fully alive. So, like enjoy it.

Curate Your Soundtrack With Intention

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Yeah, play full out with that. Yeah, and then you know, when you're in the shower, sing it loud, baby. Do it, sing it loud. Just let your voice be the music and let the music come through you, even if you don't want anybody else to hear it. And dance a little bit, move your body, shake it out, and get that rhythm out there and have fun.

SPEAKER_01 18:48

So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Awesome. So, is that wound up for the day on music?

SPEAKER_01 18:53

That's it.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

That's it. Okay, you guys. Well, we hope you enjoyed this. We hope that you uh pass this on to one of your friends if it'll help them and they love music. And I hope you get to see all these beautiful instruments around us one of these great days. And uh, I hope you get to hear Sonny sing a beautiful song because it'll blow your mind.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

Only if Bart sings.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

Let's go. And with that, we'd like to wrap up this segment by this segment sponsored by I Do Epic.