This episode originally aired on Meditative Story.

What if you woke up one day, and found that you could no longer do the thing that gave you the most joy in your life? The thing that gave you purpose? The thing that defined your past, and was supposed to define your future? For our 150th episode, Dallas tells the personal story of how he lost something that meant the world to him… and how that loss eventually led him to become the person he is today. This story comes from the podcast Meditative Story.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Original music by Wesley Slover
Tape Meditation I by Async Ross

Follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, & Reddit.

Subscribe to our Youtube channel here.

Become a monthly contributor at 20k.org/donate.

If you know what this week's mystery sound is, tell us at mystery.20k.org.

Subscribe to Meditative Story wherever you get your podcasts.

Offset your carbon footprint at wren.co. Select "Podcast" at checkout and type “Twenty Thousand Hertz” to get 10 extra trees planted in your name.

Hiring? Sign up at Indeed.com/Hertz and get a $75 credit to sponsor your first job post for better visibility, more applications, and quicker hiring times.

Visit zocdoc.com/20k to download the Zocdoc app and sign up for free.

View Transcript ▶︎

[music in]

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

Believe it or not, this is our hundred and fiftieth episode! When I started this show back in 2016, it was terrifying. I wasn't even sure we'd make it to ten episodes, let alone a hundred and fifty. So to mark the occasion, I wanted to do something a little different.

Now, I really don’t like talking about myself, but I thought this might be a perfect time to share my personal story. So over the next two episodes, you’re going to hear me talk about my life prior to Twenty Thousand Hertz, and why I think making this show is so important. But I found that it really wasn’t easy telling this story myself. So I reached out to two podcasts that I truly respect to help me out.

In this first episode, I worked with the team from Meditative Story. It’s a beautiful show that revolves around a transformative moment in someone’s life …and it’s all set to gorgeous, original music. You’ll also hear guided meditations led by the host Rohan Gunatillake.

For my story, I talk about losing what I thought was the most important thing in my life. It’s a really emotional subject for me, and it’s actually the first time I’ve ever shared it publicly. But while it is a story about loss, without that loss I would have never become a sound designer, and I would have never made this podcast.

So without further ado, here’s Rohan.

[music out]

Rohan: Dallas Taylor is fascinated by the power of sound to tell stories. He created and hosts the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, which is a huge favorite here on the Meditative Story team. His work inspires us, but before he was a brilliant sound designer and creative director, Dallas had another life as a world class trumpet player.

[music in]

Rohan: In his Meditative Story, he recalls the pressure and anxiety that came from this role. And he begins to realize that feeling this way didn't mean he was broken. It meant he was human. I'm Rohan, and I'll be your guide.

[music out]

[music in]

Rohan: The body relaxed. The body breathing. Your senses open. Your mind open, meeting the world.

Dallas: The sunlight spills into the elementary school band room. The space is bright, clean, but it has the lived-in smell of warm breath and wet reeds. Music stands fan out in rows of semi-circles, standing at attention.

Dallas: I find myself drawn to the shiny instruments. I've been thinking about playing the French horn, or perhaps the drums, but everything changes when my band director shoves a trumpet in my hand. The glare bounces off its brass coils. My fingers run over the valves. I raise the mouthpiece to my lips. Something just clicks into place.

Dallas: I take a big, deep breath and everything's resonating. My whole body is vibrating and buzzing. I blow, [sfx] controlling the sound with the tiny muscles in my face.

Dallas: The notes are resonant and loud. It's powerful. When I make this sound, everything else in my world fades away. I take my position toward the center of the band room. Percussion is behind me, the trombones sit to my left. When I play, the sound blares into the back of the clarinetist's head.

[music out]

Dallas: I'm in fifth grade, and I'm not a good student. I have terrible grammar. But in band, I'm awake. I'm present.

[music in]

Dallas: Hearing any one instrument alone is so powerful, but as we play together, I feel us reacting off of one another. There's nothing like the sound of different instruments, all locking in together in harmony. It resonates in your body, in your brain.

Dallas: When I'm in a group playing, it's as if I tap into a fourth dimension of humanity. Soon, band’s all I want to do. I'm shy, I'm quiet. But now I hold a very loud instrument, and there's no hiding when I play it. I get a lot of attention. I make a group of friends for the first time. Deep relationships, all tied to music.

[music out]

Dallas: Even when we have nothing else in common, we hang out after school together, life begins to feel a little more normal [sfx].

Dallas: I sit alone in a practice room in junior high, running through my scales. It's a musty little space as small as a closet, my fingers pump up and down across the valves guided by muscle memory. The A scale, the A flat scale, the B scale, over and over and over.

Dallas: I'm ready. I walk in calmly to a classroom, several doors down. A giant opaque white sheet is draped from the ceiling. It obscures the faces of the judges. I can't see them and they can't see me. These blind auditions let the judges be more objective.

[music in]

Dallas: It doesn't matter who you are. It's how you perform. I take a breath and play… flawlessly.

[music out]

Dallas: I'm in seventh grade, but I beat out all the ninth graders for my first chair seat to lead the school band. After that there's no looking back. As the years pass, I become the best trumpet player in my school. Then the best in the region.

Dallas: There's no real reason why I get so good, so fast playing the trumpet. No one else in my family is a musician. I go to elementary school in Hughes, Arkansas. To find me on a map, follow the Mississippi River to Memphis, then dip a little south. I'm out in the country, a poor kid in a poor area. No one really has much opportunity. Certainly not my family.  [music in]

Dallas: My home's broken. My parents divorced when I'm four. Both remarry and move to different sides of the state. Life at home is uncertain. So I keep myself detached. I spend a lot of time in cars, always being transferred from one parent to another. It's a five hour round trip to pass me off between mom and dad's new homes. I stare out the car window and watch the flatlands pass by. The fields, the tiny towns with a hole in the wall gas station. It feels hopeless. I think I might never get out of this place. More than anything, I feel like a burden.

Rohan: Throughout our lives were carried by others. Our family, friends, society. Even the planet. Perhaps we're all a burden in our own way, but we don't always have to be heavy. Shoulders, soft. Breathing, soft. Bring lightness to a part of your life where you feel like a burden.

[music out]

[music in]

Dallas: Miss Jernigan and I drive along the highway in her little black sedan. She's our band director, and a French horn player, fresh out of college. Her dark curly hair bounces as she drives. Her car smells nice. And it's so much cleaner than our car. She's driving me to a trumpet lesson at Arkansas State University.

[music out]

Dallas: The journey is an hour and a half each way. I can't afford to pay for these lessons, but Ms. Jernigan finds a way to take me. The better I get at the trumpet, the more the teachers around me start taking an interest in my progress.

Dallas: Driving back and forth it begins to set in that the trumpet is now more than a fun, creative outlet. Being good opens up possibilities that I never imagined. Traveling cross-country. Meeting people from different backgrounds. Going to college. Perhaps I can play the trumpet for the Chicago Symphony, surrounded by a world class orchestra, playing a big Gustav Holst piece.

Dallas: The trumpet is my ticket out of this desolate extreme poverty that surrounds me. It's profound to me, this investment in my talent that Miss Jernigan and the teachers who came after her make. The hundreds of hours of free lessons. The school trumpet, my teacher insists I keep because I'm too poor to purchase my own. They're counting on me to succeed.

Dallas: In my junior year at college, I'm sitting on the biggest stage of my life. It's huge and everything shines. The music stands. The polished floor. This is the university's brand new multi-million dollar concert hall. There's nothing else like it in the entire college. And tonight is the very first concert in this space.

Dallas: I'm surrounded by my bandmates. We wear black suits, stiff shoes. The grand room, the rigid clothes, it feels like we're in another century. I earned a scholarship to come here. The University of Central Arkansas, where band and orchestra are taken very seriously.

Dallas: Everyone I play with on stage wants to be a professional musician or a band director, or get a doctorate. But even here, I still stand out. As a freshman, I've beaten out all the other undergrad trumpet players and all the Masters students. I'm first chair. I'm shining. I'm joyous. And I'm certain I'm only going to get better.

[music in]

Dallas: The houselights dim. The bright stage light hits me. Everyone in the audience disappears into a big black void.

Dallas: The conductor raises his baton. Holds it. Raises it again as he breathes in, then flicks it precisely downward. The room fills with sound. Just 45 seconds till my solo. Ever since junior high school solos have been my thing. I always lean in and just take it away, knowing that I'm going to crush it. But tonight something isn't quite right.

Dallas: My breathing is too shallow, too fast. I'm sweating. My shoulders are sweating. This has never happened to me before. All of the delicate little muscles of my face are trembling. I need these muscles to play. Beside me is the second chair trumpet player Megan. She leans over and does the unthinkable. She asks, "Hey, do you need me to do this for you? Do you need me to take this solo?"

Dallas: I shake it off. I tell her “No, no, no, no. I've got this.” Do I? The weight of everything crystallizes into this one moment: the brand new concert hall, all the people I care about who rely on me, my band director, the trumpet section, every teacher that came before them who devoted countless nights and weekends expecting me to succeed, the expectations of my entire band.

Dallas: In a few seconds, every other player is going to stop. And the burden of the entire piece is going to be on me. If I frack a note, if I rush it, I'll scar this piece, stain it for everyone. On my queue, I rush in. I'm way too fast. My conductor's eyes widen in surprise.

Dallas: Everyone else will need to hurry up. I'm just trying to get it over with, so I can catch my breath. Sweat now pours from my body. I finish in half the time. I've botched the solo.

[music out]

Dallas: I try not to think about my bandmates, the people in the audience, my professors, everyone who's relying on me that I've let down.

Dallas: Afterwards we don't talk about it at all. Megan, the second chair, doesn't say a word. No one comes up to me afterwards to ask what happened, but everyone knows.

[music in]

Dallas: I don't have words for what just happened to me. But from this moment on something feels broken. Suddenly I can not perform, in any context. My confidence completely falls apart.

Dallas: The opportunities to play don't stop. Not at first. I schedule recitals, practice, practice, practice. And then the day of, I call out sick.

Dallas: My teachers get frustrated with me. The anxiety gets so overwhelming, it's making me sick. It feels like pressure building up inside and taking the wind out of me.

Dallas: The trumpet is a wind instrument. I need my wind to play. What's worse is I'm not good at anything else. My entire identity is wrapped up in Dallas Taylor, star trumpet player. The thing I wanted to do with my life was either being a performer, possibly a conductor, possibly a composer. I'm watching it all slip away, and I'm ashamed.

[music in]

I was willing to try anything to overcome my performance anxiety. I even asked one of the world's most famous trumpet players for advice. I really hoped his words would show me the way to restart my playing career. I didn't want to think about what would happen if I could never play again.

That's coming up after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Dallas: Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to become a professional trumpet player. For years, everything went according to plan. It felt like my life was unfolding exactly how it was supposed to. But in college, I started suffering from performance anxiety. No matter what I tried, I just couldn't shake the nerves, and so… I couldn’t play.

[music out]

[music in]

Dallas: It's my last semester of college. We get a visit from the principal trumpet player of the New York Philharmonic, Phil Smith.

[music out]

Dallas: He's one of the most regarded trumpet players in all orchestral history. He's giving a master class in the auditorium at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Dallas: These days. I can't even make it through tuning with the band. You know that moment at the start of rehearsal, when all the instruments play a single note to get in tune with one another? Even playing that one single note I'm shaking.

Dallas: When it's my turn to ask Phil Smith a question, there's only one thing on my mind. I want to know about Mussorgsky's piece Pictures at an Exhibition.

Dallas: It starts with this giant trumpet part [sfx]. One of the most famous of all time. All the notes, right in the middle of the horn. Not too low, not too high.

Dallas: And it keeps going and going and going and going until the entire orchestra joins in.

Dallas: In my current state of failure, this feels impossible to me. Not the notes themselves, but the pressure that's on the soloist. When Phil plays it, it's in a symphony hall in front of the most cultured group of people in the entire world. It's broadcast to radio and television. Everyone is listening.

Dallas: So I ask Phil, “How do you do that? What's your mindset?” And Phil says, “I fall to my knees and I pray to God every time, because it's an impossible task. Every time it feels like it's not within my power.”

Dallas: The room goes quiet. My brain does the same. I'm stunned. Phil's been doing this for 40 years and he still feels like he can't. The weight of this impossible task. Everyone is counting on him. How fallible he is. And he does it anyway. He finds his breath anyway.

[music in]

Dallas: Hearing Phil helps me understand that we all have an inner struggle, deep inside us, no matter what their performance is. But whether the struggle drives our success, or failure, it doesn't mean we're broken. It means we're human.

Rohan: This is important. Look back at a moment of struggle or failure in your own life. Are you able to see it as just being human? If you can't do that quite yet, how about you soften and take that as an invitation for the future.

Dallas: I want this to be the moment I learned how to overcome my anxiety, but it's not. It's a strange feeling watching my performance career wither away. I'm watching it, and I'm grieving at the same time.

[music out]

Dallas: I graduate college and I know I have to find something else. I need to make a living, and I can't become a burden.

Dallas: I attend summer recording school. If I can't make music, maybe I can record it. I learn how to mix, how to run sound for TV and eventually how to sound design. It doesn't have the same exhilaration of performing. But I start to discover the beauty of layering sounds together.

[music in]

Dallas: The anxiety doesn't vanish, but it changes. When I'm at my sound board and my hands start shaking I can just take my fingers off the fader and no one knows.

[music out]

Dallas: No room full of people looking at me, waiting for me. I can keep it all in the dark.

[music in]

Dallas: It's my birthday. And my wife has a surprise for me. It's not new. In fact, it's a present she got from an old, old friend from my band days. I open the case. It's a trumpet. Not just any trumpet. It's my friend Jeff's, from college in Arkansas. Even when I was failing, he'd been the sweetest, most caring person. He always saw the humanity in me, not the brokeness.

Dallas: My heart fills.

[music in]

Dallas: I'm grateful, but I'm also sad. I tell my wife, I'm probably not going to play this. She already knows. It had just felt wrong for me not to have a trumpet.

[music out]

Dallas: Sam pauses me mid sentence. And she says, "Why don't you sit down?" The light blazes through the floor to ceiling windows.

Dallas: We're in the reception area, in the brand new offices of the business that I own. We do sound design and mix for huge clients. TV networks. Emmy-winning shows. Ads for the biggest brands in the world. But right now, I'm standing by the sleek new front desk in a space that's just ours. And I'm having a hard time.

Dallas: My producer and I are working through a problem, and I know how many people are counting on me to get this right. I have a responsibility to every single person that works here. They count on me for their livelihoods. Their families need me to get this right. We're an ensemble.

[music in]

Dallas: But I can still feel the heat of a spotlight pinned just on me. I talk really fast. My breathing is shallow and quick. I'm sucking for air. "Well, what about this?" I say. And "What about this?" Sam looks at me and she gets really calm, which is weird. Usually we feed off of each other's energy. She says, "I think you're having a panic attack."

Dallas: “What?” I've never applied those words to me before. Until now, I didn't think panic attacks were real. Sam tells me to sit down and take some breaths. She's so thoughtful the way she leads me through this, she says, "It's okay. We don't need to solve everything at this very moment."

Dallas: I watch the light flood into the rest of the room. The imaginary spotlight on me goes away and I breathe.

[music out]

Dallas: For a while, I resist embracing this new label for what's been happening to me since college. And so I start having more panic attacks. When there's something important I have to do. When I'm the center of attention.

Dallas: When everyone needs me to succeed. If I fail in those moments, it feels like I'm not worthy of any of the care and investment people have put in me. If I fail, I feel like a burden. Like I was for my parents during their divorce. Like I was for the teachers who invested in my success as a trumpet player.

Dallas: Knowing what a panic attack is doesn't make it go away. But I finally, finally accept that they are real. I develop techniques to manage my stress when I start to feel panicky. Like making physical contact with myself, touching my arm or my clothing. Focusing on the sensation grounds me. It reminds me to breathe.

Dallas: I also begin to realize that what I'm going through is quite common. That it doesn't make me uniquely messed up. It's just another part of being human.

[music in]

Dallas: I sit with my oldest daughter, and her voice fills my ears. She's five and she loves singing. She's so proud of herself. I don't want to do anything to get in her way. She's singing me a Daniel Tiger song, which is a Fred Rogers song. “It's you I like. It's not the things you wear. It's not the way you do your hair, but it's you I like.”

Dallas: Something inside me just bursts. She can see me having this visceral intense reaction and she just smiles and says, "Yeah, I love you daddy."

Dallas: And suddenly I'm hit with the force of this unconditional love. I have three children and they don't need me to be anything besides who I am. Once I accept that unconditional love, I start to see that the same thing is true for a lot of people in my life. My wife who's been with me for 20 years. My work colleagues, friends who have no skin in the game besides their friendship. I'm loved by all of these people. And I love them too.

[music out]

Dallas: My trumpet now lives near my daughter's playroom. It holds a fascination for them. Sometimes I let them play it.

[music in]

Dallas: And sometimes, not very often, but sometimes I play it for them.

Dallas: I take the trumpet out of its case. Its shape feels familiar and still a mystery. The valves stick when I pick it up. So I moved them to get them limber. I put the instrument up to my mouth and the fear surges back. There's still so much baggage that comes with this motion, so much loss, but I don't want to stay in this moment with melancholy.

Dallas: I want my girls to have their own relationship with music. I want them to feel unconditional love. Like they can do anything, and if they can't do something, that's okay. It happens to all of us. It's just part of being a person.

Dallas: I play goofy scales for my daughters on this trumpet, and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. They're wowed. To them, the song is flawless. And just like that, I can breathe again.

CREDITS

That story came from the amazing team at Meditative Story. Their podcast combines human stories with meditation prompts embedded into the storylines – all surrounded by breathtaking music. Over on their feed, this episode ends with a full, six minute meditation about finding wisdom when you feel like you’ve failed at something. To hear that, along with stories from doctors, athletes, actors, musicians, and more, subscribe to Meditative Story right here in your podcast player.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. For more, visit defacto sound dot com.

Rohan: Meditative Story is a WaitWhat original. Our Executive Producers are Deron Triff and June Cohen. Jai Punjabi is our Supervising Producer.

Rohan: The series is produced by Dorothy Abrahams. Original music and sound design by Ryan Holladay. Our script writers are Hannah Brencher, Peter Koechley, Marie McCoy Thompson and Florence Williams. Mixing and mastering by Bryan Pugh.

Rohan: Special thanks to Emily McManus, Anna Pizzino, Sarah Tarter, Kelsie Capitano, Tim Cronin, Sammie Oputa, Lia Seremetis, Colin Howarth, Chineme Ezekwenna, Chaurley Meneses and Adam Hiner. And I’m Rohan Gunatillake, creator of the Buddhify meditation app.

Rohan: Trumpet on today's episode is by Danny Levin and Dallas Taylor. Dallas, those notes you were willing to risk sharing mean so much.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]