Rick Beato: Greatest Guitarists of All Time, History & Future of Music | Lex Fridman Podcast #492
Summary
- Generative music makes judgment and authenticity scarcer, not musicianship automatically obsolete. Beato found only three good ideas among roughly 130 AI-generated songs; his children also learned to identify early AI audio from vocal-reverb artifacts. Better training data may erase those tells, but both speakers expect audiences to devalue effortless output: “We want to celebrate and see the thing that’s hard to create.”
- Music-rights enforcement lets incumbents capture creator economics even when the use is commentary or education. Beato says 20 seconds of claimed music can divert all revenue from a one-hour video, while three strikes can threaten the channel itself. After years of accepting that risk, he hired a lawyer who challenged 4,000 Content ID claims across Beato’s 2,100-video catalog and “won every single one.”
- Streaming expanded discovery while turning music into a low-friction commodity with weaker context and contested artist economics. Spotify’s play counts reveal demand, and its radio functions can surface unfamiliar artists, but Beato argues algorithms also pigeonhole listeners while album-length attention and access to original-master fidelity can be lost. His summary: music has become “like turning on a water faucet.”
- Beato’s career is a case study in domain mastery compounding before distribution. Classical-bass and jazz-guitar degrees led to college teaching, a 1992 publishing deal, self-taught engineering at 37, production, video editing, and finally YouTube in his mid-50s; the channel reached 100,000 subscribers after a year, then 200,000 six months later. His operating belief is simple: “Somebody’s gotta be successful, so why can’t it be you?”
- Musical fluency is built through exposure, retrieval, and daily repetition rather than occasional intensity. Beato theorizes that sophisticated prenatal and infant listening helped his son Dylan retain perfect pitch, while relative pitch can make major progress within a couple of months of daily work. For instruments, his rule is “10 minutes a day, seven days a week” over one weekly hour—the habit often expands once the guitar is already in hand.
- Creative constraints and relentless repetitions can become productive infrastructure. Beato theorizes that unusable PA systems pushed the Beatles away from touring and into the studio, where Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver arrived within 365 days; Elton John described writing melodies to Bernie Taupin’s lyrics in roughly 15 minutes and completing records in two weeks. The mechanism is accumulated craft under pressure, not a repeatable shortcut to inspiration.
- The strongest artist brands are recognizable before the listener can name the song. Beato believes a single note can identify B.B. King, David Gilmour, Brian May, Hendrix, or Van Halen because phrasing, vibrato, space, touch, and tone converge into an individual language. That identity—not speed or leaderboard rank—is why “greatest guitarist” lists remain biographical and useful discovery tools.
Deep dive
1. “Hey Joe” made guitar technique feel like a discoverable language
Beato’s first solo was “Hey Joe,” learned at 14 without notation or online instruction. The E–C–G–D–A progression was approachable, and the solo revealed an E minor pentatonic shape before he knew its name: “Whoa, he’s just in this one shape here.”
The family story carries his learning model. Beato would accompany his 11-year-old brother John, who refused to return the favor; after the resulting fights, their mother learned the chords and played rhythm for 20 minutes while Rick soloed. Looking back after her death, he thought, “My God, my parents were so cool.”
Fridman’s correction was important: Hendrix’s chord names may look simple, but the rhythm contains fragments, riffs, muting, and improvisational movement. Beato agreed that those transformations—not merely the chord chart—constitute “the Hendrix style.”
2. Guitar greatness is a lineage, not a stable leaderboard
Beato resists declaring one objective “greatest,” because Hendrix inherited a century of technique. He named Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, and Andrés Segovia as three foundational 20th-century influences on later players, making greatness partly a question of what each generation made possible for the next.
Django’s best specimen is physical constraint converted into vocabulary: after a fire left his ring finger and pinky largely unusable for lines, he played astonishingly fast improvisations mainly with two fingers. The modern Gypsy-jazz movement still organizes itself around that style; “everything he’s doing there is improvised.”
Beato’s top-20 lists deliberately mix personal canon with discovery. Opinions “change from day to day,” and he reserves room for an unfamiliar Allan Holdsworth solo or another “oddball” choice so a large audience encounters something outside the predictable ranking.
3. Bebop taught Beato to hear sophistication before he could name it
Beato traced bebop from big-band swing into small groups using familiar progressions, often AABA forms, as improvisational vehicles. Charlie Parker developed a faster, more angular language built from chromatic “connecting notes,” making the style substantially harder to internalize than the swing vocabulary preceding it.
His non-musician father nevertheless played Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, and Joe Pass at home. Beato absorbed that syntax without knowing it was difficult; like childhood language acquisition, early exposure made sounds feel normal that can seem forbidding when first encountered as a teenager.
The broader proposition is that blues, bebop, and other improvisational traditions are “all just languages.” Technical theory can label their intervals and harmony later, but fluency begins when repeated listening turns unfamiliar combinations into expected speech.
4. Dylan’s perfect pitch became a theory about native musical fluency
Perfect pitch, in Beato’s definition, identifies any note or collection of notes without a reference. Relative pitch instead identifies relationships after a tonic or starting note is supplied—an A followed by C, for example, can be recognized as a minor third.
Beato believes children begin with a broad sensitivity that narrows around nine months as they become “culturally bound listeners.” He connected this to Patricia Kuhl’s language research, including an experiment in which a person spoke Mandarin to babies three times weekly for 25-minute sessions. He also says language acquisition involves the social brain and social cues, rather than passive exposure alone.
His own experiment began prenatally at roughly 15 weeks: 30 minutes nightly of “high-information music,” followed after birth by an hour of morning listening with face-to-face interaction. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Aydin Esen’s improvisations, Keith Jarrett, jazz, classical, and modern classical supplied complex harmony without anyone drilling note names.
Beato presents this as his explanation, not a demonstrated causal result: “I believe that all kids are born with perfect pitch.” Fridman’s useful shorthand was “native music fluency”—learning the musical language socially before conscious theory divides it into named components.
5. Dylan already knew the pitches before he learned their names
The first clues appeared around age two, when Dylan could sing Neal Schon’s “Stone in Love” solo and Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” At three and a half, he reproduced the Star Wars and Superman themes in their original keys, then associated B-flat with Star Wars and G with Superman at the piano.
Beato says it took five minutes to teach him the 12 note names: Dylan already perceived the distinctions but lacked the labels. Dylan’s own account was not visual or synesthetic—“every note sounds completely different.”
At eight, Dylan instantly named isolated pitches, intervals, and dense polychords such as C augmented over D-flat augmented, A-flat major over A major, A minor over D-flat major, and E add 9 over F major. The inversions and close voicings crowded every pitch into the piano’s middle register, forcing both auditory separation and theoretical reconstruction.
The casually recorded demonstration—Dylan had candy in his mouth and did not want to participate—reportedly reached about 80 million Facebook views and 250,000 comments. Beato’s explanation for the virality: the more musical knowledge viewers possessed, the more extraordinary they understood the test to be.
6. Ear training joins sound, theory, and physical execution
Relative-pitch practice starts with minor and major seconds, then expands through the 12 intervals in an octave. Students identify them sequentially as melodic intervals and simultaneously as harmonic intervals before moving into major, minor, diminished, augmented, and suspended chords.
Beato thinks daily practice can produce substantial progress “within a couple of months.” The payoff is operational: hear a progression as six minor–four major–five major–one major, identify the first chord, and infer the others by relationship; the same skill accelerates transcription of melodies and solos.
Theory and ear training therefore belong together. “Music theory is just the name of things in music”: the ear supplies sound, theory supplies categories, and playing supplies the haptic knowledge needed to reproduce them.
For a guitar beginner, however, Beato prioritizes open-position chords and songs over abstract scale study. Motivation comes first; theory can deepen later once the student can strum something recognizable and has a reason to keep returning.
7. Guitar fluency hides hundreds of microscopic physical decisions
The earliest obstacle is often not harmony but finger placement: arching a finger so a C-major shape frets the B string without muting the open E. Calluses and discomfort last perhaps a week or two, while accurate pressure and placement require repeated microadjustment.
Lead playing adds invisible muting. During a bend on the ninth fret of the G string in “Comfortably Numb,” the index finger must stop the adjacent B string from ringing; Hendrix’s thumb-over grip also muted lower strings through loud amplifiers. What looks improper may solve a real acoustic problem.
Beato’s sequence branches by musical goal: riffs such as “Back in Black,” Hendrix-style chordal movement, single-note leads, fingerpicking for “Stairway to Heaven,” flat-picking, or hybrid picking. The instrument is not one technique but a collection of coordinated solutions.
His practice rule for Dylan was frequency over batching: “It’s better to practice 10 minutes a day, seven days a week than to practice one day for an hour.” Keeping a guitar on a stand lowers the activation cost; a passing minute can become ten minutes or two hours.
8. Joe Pass proved that struggle can teach what explanation cannot
Beato’s father gave him Joe Pass’s 1973 album Virtuoso in tenth grade with an unusually direct challenge: “If you ever learn to play guitar like this, you’ve accomplished something with your life.” The sealed record sat until March before curiosity overcame intimidation.
With no interval training, chord vocabulary, or theoretical explanation, Beato repeatedly moved the needle and tried finger combinations until unfamiliar shapes matched the record. He memorized the sound and geometry first; only later could he describe the material as chord inversions, top notes of C9, and recurring bebop language.
The record ended badly scratched, but “the struggle is where it’s at.” Modern tutorials can reveal the answer immediately; Beato and Fridman agreed that education loses something when making learning easier also removes the search that builds perception.
His father’s response to the completed performance was characteristically restrained—“Hmm, pretty good”—yet the episode became a durable measure of accomplishment and linked technical mastery to their otherwise wordless ritual of listening through entire album sides together.
9. Miles Davis engineered flow by removing preparation
Beato called Miles Davis “the greatest innovator in the history of jazz,” moving from bebop through Birth of the Cool, modal jazz, hard bop, and Bitches Brew-era fusion. His 1950s group included John Coltrane, while the 1960s quintet brought together Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and Wayne Shorter.
Ron Carter, who told Beato he had played bass on 2,200 recordings, said Miles’s band never rehearsed: charts appeared at the studio and “we’d just roll.” They did not listen afterward, and sometimes learned months later that a club performance had been recorded when an album appeared.
That lack of advance notice was not neglect but a method for preserving danger. Miles wanted musicians to feel and play before self-consciousness calcified the moment—an instance of Vinnie Colaiuta’s formulation, “Thought is the enemy of flow.”
10. Flea shows how early jazz exposure survives inside another genre
Flea grew up around his jazz-bassist stepfather’s home jam sessions after moving from Australia to New York. Beato recognized his own childhood mechanism in that history: “Once it gets inside you, it’s just there,” even when the resulting public music is Red Hot Chili Peppers rather than bebop.
During Beato’s interview, Flea’s playful personality changed as soon as he picked up the bass. His practice demonstrations, especially the slap playing, carried an immediate “fierceness”—evidence that a band’s rhythmic energy lives partly in physical attack, not merely in written notes.
Fridman said he thinks of himself as a bassist first: cello in third grade, bass in sixth, then an undergraduate degree in classical bass. Beato also later identified his own undergraduate degree as being in classical bass.
In Fridman’s account, bass is the most powerful instrument in the ensemble even though he most loves playing guitar. “Whatever you play in the bass kinda defines what kind of chord it is.”
11. The best solos combine personal history with unmistakable identity
“Comfortably Numb” topped Beato’s list that day, but he chose the less-discussed first solo; a day later he might have chosen the second. Watching David Gilmour hear the studio recording again revealed how rarely creators revisit work they have performed live “a million times.”
Gilmour’s genius is melodic sequencing: one phrase flows into another, with silence performing as much work as speed. Beato hears the same speech-like organization in Hendrix—ideas, pauses, and transitions forming a voice rather than a display of isolated technique.
The list’s biographical choices included “Hey Joe,” Larry Carlton’s difficult “Kid Charlemagne,” Neal Schon’s “Stone in Love,” Carlos Rios’s little-known “Brother to Brother,” Mark Knopfler’s “Sultans of Swing,” and Van Halen’s hand-stretching “Ice Cream Man.” Difficulty mattered, but so did discovery and what each solo had meant to Beato.
The proposed experiment distilled identity further: could listeners recognize guitarists from one note? Fridman was skeptical, but Beato argued that B.B. King’s vibrato, Brian May’s tone, and the touch and tone of players such as Gilmour, Hendrix, and Van Halen could be sufficient.
12. Gilmour’s tone came from continuity, convenience, and accepted accidents
At Gilmour’s studio, Beato found original effects, a Binson Echorec, and a Hiwatt amplifier maintained by a technician who had worked with him for roughly 50 years. The famous sound reflects decades of retained equipment and accumulated decisions, not one transferable setting.
Yet Gilmour also used a Zoom 9030, an early-1990s modeling unit, with presets labeled DG1 and DG2. Working alone in Pro Tools, he could plug in, capture a solo, and later decide, “I’m not gonna replay that. That sounds great.”
That concession breaks the purity narrative: listeners assumed a convincing tone must have come through a traditional amplifier, while the artist sometimes kept the modeled take because performance outranked provenance. Familiarity with the recorded sound then made that sound definitive.
13. Great interviews are accumulated knowledge activated by curiosity
Beato says he never prepares a fixed question list because he asks what he genuinely wants to know and follows each answer. He does prepare a playlist: hearing a recording from 50 years earlier can jog the artist’s memory and reopen details about phrasing, sound, arrangement, and melodic direction.
The apparent spontaneity rests on unusually deep memory—release dates, producers, engineers, studios, track lists—and the ability to play every instrumental part from songs he has broken down. That fluency is also why major musicians trust him with interviews in the first place.
Producer interviews offer unusually broad terrain because Rick Rubin, Daniel Lanois, Brendan O’Brien, and Butch Vig could work across multiple records while a touring artist might spend years between releases. Beato sees recording and production as under-documented crafts whose old assistant-engineer mentorship pipeline has diminished.
Ken Scott embodied that old ladder: he began at Abbey Road as a 16-year-old tape operator on A Hard Day’s Night and said the first orchestra he recorded was for “I Am the Walrus,” with the Beatles standing behind him. Historic recordings still began with “a blank tape or an empty hard drive.”
14. Hooks and bridges change a song’s frame, often by accident
Fridman offered Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” drum break as a singular cultural event. Beato’s answer was more structural: it is a hook as surely as a chorus, the moment listeners wait to air-drum, and such moments are “usually done by accident.”
Sting’s phrase “the bridge is therapy” reframed the section as reflection before returning to the chorus. Beato broadened it: the bridge can change the song’s frame of reference, introducing a contrasting argument, emotional perspective, or writer’s personality.
“We Can Work It Out” was the specimen. McCartney’s verse asks the listener to “see it my way,” while Lennon’s sharper bridge insists that life is too short for fighting; the contrast captures genuine collaboration rather than smoothing two writers into one voice.
15. The Beatles turned technical constraints into an output machine
Beato’s theory is that primitive PA systems and screaming audiences made the Beatles unable to hear themselves, so they abandoned touring and became a studio band. Bad live technology may therefore have helped produce the great late Beatles records from 1966 onward.
The production rate was extraordinary: Help! arrived August 6, 1965, Rubber Soul on December 3, and Revolver on August 5, 1966—three roughly 14-song albums within 365 days. Constant writing, singing, and recording worked like daily athletic training.
The “perfect storm” joined four talented musicians, competitive songwriters and singers, and George Martin as producer. Earlier, the Beatles had also played eight-hour cover sets in Hamburg; Fridman’s point was that these apparently young writers had already “lived life” and accumulated formidable repetitions.
Beato’s age thesis remains explicitly a theory: fluid intelligence and processing speed may favor novel pop writing and jazz improvisation before 30, while crystallized life experience lets composers produce late masterworks. He cited Beethoven’s late quartets and Ninth Symphony as the opposite creative curve.
16. Drugs amplified musical culture while destroying its participants
The “27 Club”—Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, and Kurt Cobain—made the entanglement of music and drugs impossible to romanticize cleanly. Fridman described touring as a dopamine roller coaster: mass adoration onstage followed by an unusually difficult comedown.
Both speakers acknowledged that LSD, cocaine, heroin, cannabis, alcohol, and cigarettes sometimes entered music as cultural muses, not merely chemicals. That does not make them advisable; Beato answered “No” when asked whether anyone should use drugs to boost creativity.
His provocative qualification concerned smoking: almost every major singer once smoked, and he believes the rasp could enrich a voice. He cited Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, McCartney, and Lennon, while also noting Cole’s reported four-pack-a-day habit and death from lung cancer. The effect and the cost remain inseparable.
17. Songwriting systems range from 15-minute melodies to jam-built metal
Elton John told Beato that he and Bernie Taupin could write and record an album in two weeks, make two records a year, and tour between them. Taupin supplied lyrics; Elton could inspect the page and generate a melody in roughly 15 minutes.
Fridman considers writing music to finished lyrics far harder than the dominant workflow. He says 99% of writers build music first, then add melody and final words—sometimes replacing nonsense syllables that initially preserve only phrasing and rhythm.
Kirk Hammett exposed the improvisation underneath Metallica’s rigid surfaces. Songs begin as jams and fragments before the band crafts them into fixed structures; James Hetfield’s riff writing and relentless downpicking supply the architecture, while Hammett’s melodic instinct keeps improvisation alive inside it.
The “perfect song” question deliberately forces a temporary commitment. Peter Frampton chose “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Hans Zimmer chose “God Only Knows,” and Fridman landed on “Sultans of Swing”—a song combining lyrics, melody, several solos, a unique early Dire Straits sound, and a meta-story about musicians.
18. Dissonance and melancholy make sadness feel companionable
Billy Corgan jokingly located melancholy in the seventh and ninth above a chord. Beato called such notes “surprise tones”: pitches outside the basic harmony create tension, and “dissonance equals emotion.” The technique is widespread, but individual placement and delivery determine whether it feels profound or merely decorative.
Fridman argued that melancholy is not simply depressing; it carries longing, hope, regret, loneliness, and the intimacy of listening alone. Beato found the compression of that idea in Kurt Cobain’s line, “I miss the comfort of being sad.”
Pearl Jam’s “Black” supplied the love-song version: the narrator wishes someone a beautiful future while asking why he cannot share it. Beato emphasized that Eddie Vedder’s delivery completes the lyric; emotional force resides in the interaction between words, melody, timbre, and performance.
19. Historic performances fuse musical quality with social context
Fridman nominated Metallica’s September 1991 Moscow concert as perhaps the greatest: the Black Album had just arrived, AC/DC and Pantera shared the event, and he judged attendance likely around 1.5–1.6 million despite lower reports. The set ran from “Enter Sandman” and “Creeping Death” through “Master of Puppets,” “One,” and “Whiplash.”
His argument was not attendance alone. A band at its peak met the collapse of a defining political order, letting listeners temporarily escape fear and anger through music. Beato agreed the group was “really at their peak,” though he now personally prefers studios and small clubs to giant shows.
Beethoven’s Ninth represented another collision of music and history: a deaf, frequently ill composer imagined and repeatedly edited a vast orchestral work he could not physically hear in full, then had to be turned toward the applauding audience. Beato kept returning to the motivational mystery—why create beauty when the finished sound exists only internally?
Bach remained Beato’s deeper root: “the greatest composer of all time, the greatest musician of all time,” studied by Beethoven, Mozart, songwriters, Sting, and Dominic Miller. Yet he happily preserved the counterweight: Bach did not write “Master of Puppets,” and sometimes “a good riff is greater than any musical composition.”
20. AI music shifts value from generation toward judgment and proof of effort
Beato’s AI workflow created a fictional artist image in ChatGPT, lyrics in Claude, and songs in Suno. The tools could produce striking results, but the hit rate was roughly three worthwhile ideas from 130—making taste, rejection, and revision the human bottleneck.
His children detected early generations instantly through “ringing” artifacts in vocal reverb, likely reflecting low-bitrate training sources. Later examples became harder to identify, and Beato says label agreements could provide multitracks, isolated vocals, and high-quality WAV files, potentially tied to opt-in royalties.
Fridman’s pushback was existential: if someone can write lyrics, hum fragments, and assemble a finished song without touching an instrument, what remains for musicianship? Beato’s answer was personal rather than universal: AI can generate ideas for performers to replay and produce, but “that’s why I’m not gonna use AI…to me, it’s just boring.”
Both expect synthetic abundance to increase demand for authenticity. AI is valuable for separating dialogue from musical bleed, denoising, restoration, or precise editing; when the generated artifact itself is the product, audiences may reject it because effortless production removes the difficulty they wanted to witness.
21. Modern hit machinery blurs creation, interpolation, and attribution
In discussing “Manchild,” Beato described a clip in which Jack Antonoff, Amy Allen, and Sabrina Carpenter referred to an “old guy on YouTube” who said Sabrina had very little to do with the song. Beato said Sabrina wrote everything and asked why the others were included in the songwriting.
He objected more broadly to songs carrying ten or 11 writers, especially when awards elevate interpolations or samples. Doechii’s “Anxiety,” in his telling, removes Gotye’s melody and adds a new one over an already successful foundation that Beato linked to 2011 and Luiz Bonfá in 1967.
Fridman preserved the distinction between criticizing musicians and criticizing the machine promoting particular tracks. Beato praised Doechii’s other work, Bruno Mars, Billie Eilish and Finneas, and Taylor Swift, whose own songs generally use no more than two co-writers; the complaint is about incentives and selection, not categorical decline.
22. Copyright enforcement and streaming economics favor scale
Early in Beato’s channel, using recordings could cause instant blocks from rights holders associated with acts such as Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC, Fleetwood Mac, and Led Zeppelin. After a viral TikTok returned Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” to number one, labels appeared to recognize promotional value and shifted increasingly toward monetization claims.
The new arrangement still transfers leverage: Beato says a claimant can take all revenue from a one-hour video containing 20 seconds of music. A top-20 solo breakdown can attract 20 claims, against either the sound recording or the underlying publishing rights.
After the Rick Rubin interview, Beato hired a lawyer who reviewed 2,100 videos and fought 4,000 claims, winning every one. His recommendation is bounded: challenge claims when the use is genuinely analysis, education, an interview, or another fair-use context—not when a channel merely republishes a full song.
Spotify completes the scale story. Public play counts reveal demand and recommendation tools expand discovery, but Beato criticized artist payments, podcast inclusion in the revenue pool, and algorithms that repeatedly serve one genre. Fridman gained variety; Beato mourned music becoming “a commodity.”
23. Production tools matter less than mastery, but sound remains physical
Beato works primarily in Pro Tools while also using Logic and Ableton, all on Mac. His practical advice is DAW-agnostic: “Any DAW that you get used to” can work, but producers and engineers must master the functions their craft actually requires.
He uses Neural DSP, Kemper, Axe-Fx, Helix, and other modeling systems while keeping roughly 95–100 real amplifiers. Each survives because it does one job exceptionally: a modified Marshall JCM800 for mids, Mesa/Boogie for scooped metal, or Vox AC30 for Brian May- or Edge-like chime.
The guitar collection follows the same sonic logic. A 1957 Gibson Country Western gives tight, balanced midrange without booming bass; a J-45 and Martin D-28 cover other acoustic roles, while Nashville tuning raises lower strings an octave. Gilmour used a variant with the low E raised two octaves while writing “Comfortably Numb.”
For playback, Beato retains WAV files ripped from CDs around 2005 and uses them in interviews. Listeners notice the difference, especially with mixers such as Andy Wallace: original encoding can preserve qualities lost through streaming compression or brightened remasters.
24. Beato’s late success came from mastery, curiosity, and accumulated trust
The channel began accidentally after Dylan’s viral video created more requests than Beato could answer individually. Ear-training and theory videos were an efficient response: 4,000 subscribers arrived in the first month, another 4,000 the next, then 100,000 after a year, 200,000 six months later, and 300,000 three months after that.
That distribution followed decades of work: an undergraduate classical-bass degree, a jazz-guitar master’s from New England Conservatory, five years teaching jazz studies, a 1992 PolyGram publishing deal, and a self-taught transition into engineering and production at 37. He later taught himself video editing, interviewing, Shorts, and thumbnail design.
Fridman’s correction is the career lesson: young creators may optimize directly for fame, but Beato spent years “getting good at something” off-camera. From 1999 to 2015, he would not even allow bands to photograph him; visibility was an outcome of useful knowledge, not the original craft.
Beato’s closing priorities put the metrics in perspective. “Never waste a friendship” means speaking with siblings several times weekly and keeping friends from every life stage; relationships are “pretty much everything.” Music’s role is to enlighten people and become “the soundtrack of their life”—one of the greatest things humans ever created.