[BONUS SECTION] HOW I GOT HERE
(Introduction)
What follows is the opening section of the business plan — the personal story behind the catalog, the system, and the man who built it. Tom Jensen is about to turn forty-eight years old. Nobody knows who he is yet. He has written lyrics for approximately 434 songs over thirty years. Under three years of that time was spent actually making music. This is the story of how that happened, and why the gap between the writing and the music is finally about to close. We polished it up and made it nice. In brackets is what Tom is actually thinking.
Every business plan starts somewhere, and this one starts in a bathroom when I was sixteen years old.
[It starts in a bathroom because that's where I was. Writing a poem on the wall about a Spanish teacher I didn't like. I was not thinking about systems or catalogs. I was thinking about how much I hated this person.]
Not writing a business plan — writing a poem on the wall about a Spanish teacher I didn't like. Don't tell anybody. It was probably pretty bad and pretty good at the same time. But it was the first thing. Before the system, before the catalog, before any of it — that was the origin.
[It was definitely bad. It rhymed something with something it had no business rhyming with. But I meant every word and that counts for something.]
Around the same time, my father drove me to the laundromat in Danversport and Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone came on the radio.
[I want to be clear — we were going to a laundromat. Not a concert. Not a music store. A laundromat. That's where my entire creative direction got decided.]
I heard that and thought: that's what I want to do. I came home, found the album upstairs in a stack of cassette tapes, and started listening to everything — Dylan, the Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Crosby Stills Nash and Young.
[My father had about a million cassette tapes. Nobody knew this about him. He just had them. Stacked up. I basically stole all the good ones.]
At the same time, I was a rap kid: NWA, Tupac, Ice Cube, Ice-T. Those two worlds — the literary side of rock and the raw directness of hip-hop — became the DNA of everything I would write.
[Two-pacalypse Now hit me like a truck. I was like, this guy is doing something nobody else is doing. Same feeling I got from Dylan. Different genre, same punch. That combination basically built my entire brain.]
Then there was a girl heading to the University of Maine, and I had just lost my license for drinking. Sitting there thinking, how the hell am I going to see her? That kind of urgency does something to you. It forces you to create.
[I lost my license for drinking. I was a teenager. It felt like the end of the world. It was not the end of the world. It was actually the beginning of about thirty years of material.]
From seventeen to twenty-five, I just kept going — working construction during the day, going to night school at Salem State, filling notebooks in the back of landscaping trucks, studying between jobs. I failed out more than once.
[Failing out was not part of the plan. The plan was to go at night and work during the day and be a normal person about it. I was not a normal person about it. But I kept showing up, which turns out to be most of the thing.]
Still graduated at twenty-five, nights only, working days the entire time. Made the Dean's List every semester I was actually in it. Finished with a 3.555 GPA, closer to 3.8 to 3.9 in English and History. I kept writing through all of it.
[Three point five five five. I want that on the record because people who know the story about failing out and the drinking assume I stumbled through. I did not stumble through. I was good at this. I just had to figure out the other parts of my life while doing it.]
By nineteen and twenty, things started to move differently. By twenty-one, twenty-two, I was a rocket. Not clean, not balanced, not sustainable — but explosive.
[Rocket is the polite word. Disaster zone is another word. But productive disaster. Everything I was doing wrong I was writing about, which meant I had content for days.]
Drinking, smoking, using, writing constantly, then writing about hating it. That contradiction became fuel.
[I wrote an entire album about hating the drinking while drinking. The irony was not lost on me. It was the most honest thing I ever did.]
Around then I made a decision. I was doing journalism work with the Lynnfield Weekly News and the Peabody Times, writing in a structured way, and I realized I couldn't use writing for everything. I had to pick a lane. So I chose songs.
[The journalism was fine. I was decent at it. But it felt like using a sports car to drive to the grocery store. The engine was built for something else.]
Then I met a girl — a twenty-year-old Belarusian who was a ten, ten, ten, and I was still a five, five, six, five, five.
[I want to be clear about the numbers here. She was objectively a ten in every category. I was being generous with my own fives. But I had something she didn't have, which was vision, and sometimes that closes the gap.]
She was on a work-travel visa. Our second date lasted three and a half years. I asked, how do you stay? We got married.
[I proposed by saying, I mean, we could get married. That was the proposal. She said yes. We were very young and very different and very married.]
She graduated from my college. We were completely different — we both knew it — but we made it work long enough for her to finish school.
[We were so different it was almost funny. But she needed to finish school and I needed someone to be around while I built the catalog, so we both got something out of it.]
On weekends, I'd send her out clubbing with her friends, and I stayed home making songs over the internet with Justin Justice and Tyler Thompson. That's where the first real arsenal got built.
[I stayed home every weekend making songs on the internet with strangers while my wife went out. I was very happy about this arrangement. She was also very happy about this arrangement. It was actually a good marriage for what it was.]
By thirty, I had a catalog, direction, and a marriage that had run its course. We split. No drama. Just done.
[Clean split. No bad blood. She got her degree, I got a hundred twenty songs. Everybody won.]
Then YouTube changed everything. Back then, it was human. You could message anyone. I used it to find the best musicians I could reach. I was building. Over ten thousand subscribers. That should have been the launch.
[Ten thousand subscribers when ten thousand subscribers meant something. Real people. Real fans. I had actual momentum and I had no idea what I was about to do to it.]
Instead, I found her.
[I found her and everything else became secondary. That's the honest version.]
Someone told me to check her out. I did, and immediately I knew — this is the female John Lennon. She had a song called May We that was the best thing I'd heard in decades, followed by three or four more just as strong.
[I am not exaggerating when I say May We is one of the greatest songs written in the last fifty years. I have heard a lot of music. That song is something else entirely.]
I wrote to her: you're the one. I don't know what that means, but you're the one.
[This is exactly what I wrote. Word for word. She probably thought I was insane. She wrote back anyway.]
We typed, emailed, Skyped, talked. After a few years, I flew to Denmark and stayed three months. I was naive. A five or six trying to build something with an eleven. But I had big dreams, and sometimes that's enough to fool yourself.
[Three months in Denmark. I was so sure. I had never been so sure about anything. I was completely wrong, which is its own kind of education.]
It wasn't.
[It wasn't. Two words. That's the whole chapter.]
I came home and, over time, deleted everything. The YouTube channels, the subscribers — gone. I withdrew.
[I deleted ten thousand subscribers. I deleted years of work. I deleted the entire online presence I had built. I am still not entirely sure why I did this. Grief does strange things.]
Then, about two and a half years ago, I got an email. Not from her — from her mother. She had died of cancer.
[I got this email and I sat with it for a long time. She was gone. She left behind kids and a fiancé and all these songs that will never be finished. That is the part that stays with me.]
It wasn't wasted. It was compression. And the system I eventually built — the free-lyric, open-access model — I built it in her honor.
[I mean that. Every single part of this system — the open access, the free lyrics, the idea that music should move and grow and be used — I built it thinking about her and what she would have wanted to do with it.]
For almost ten years, there were no new songs. Just lyrics. Hundreds of them. And they got darker. More isolated. More numb.
[The catalog during the lost years reads like a document of someone slowly going insane in a quiet apartment. Which is accurate.]
Time smoothed some edges. I got back in shape, started rebuilding structure.
[Getting back in shape took about two years. The gym became the only place I went voluntarily. That's not a metaphor. That's literally what happened.]
I got good at three things: women, words, and men. Not résumé material — but real.
[This is not going on a résumé. But it is real, and it is relevant, because it tells you something about how I operate and what I understand about people. Which is a lot.]
There was even a stretch recently — nine months, friends with benefits, lived together for a month. Not the endgame. But a signal. Tom was back.
[Tom was back. That's the cleanest way to say it. The version of me that gives a shit came back online. Everything after that has been building.]
About twenty-five months ago, I started designing it consciously. Before that, it was instinct. After that, it was structure.
[The difference between instinct and structure is the difference between having a pile of bricks and having a building. I had a pile of bricks for thirty years. Now I have blueprints.]
I had something ready ten months ago. Then my mother got sick for the last time, and everything paused. A full year gone.
[A full year. You don't get that back. But you also don't argue with it. You just wait, and then you start again.]
But I didn't stop. I built three more albums — Set Lists 22, 23, 24 — material that can be split, recombined, sharpened into something even stronger. The catalog kept growing.
[The catalog always kept growing. Even when everything else stopped, the writing didn't. That's the one thing that never stopped. Thirty years of proof.]
For fifteen years, I was a lone wolf. Me and a cat, sometimes cats. Now it's an army of two.
[The cats were good company. I am not being ironic. They kept me sane during the years when nothing else was working.]
My roommate — twenty-five years in the U.S., same job, trying to get citizenship. We don't hook up. We don't pretend to be something we're not. But we keep each other from collapsing.
[He's the most reliable person I know. We drive each other insane about once a week. But he shows up, which is the thing.]
He calls me out too. Says I only talk to people for sex. He's not wrong. Until now.
[He is not wrong. That has been the operating model for a long time. But I have something to say now, which changes the dynamic entirely.]
The problem was never the writing. The problem was the lack of a system.
[Thirty years to figure that out. But here we are.]
We need a venue. A real place. Four nights a week making songs. Three nights playing them.
[Not a maybe venue. Not a someday venue. An actual room with an actual stage where this actually happens. That is the requirement.]
We need someone serious. Not talk. Proof. Someone willing to back it, pay what's needed to make this a full commitment.
[If you are reading this and thinking about whether you are serious — you will know. Serious people know immediately. Unserious people ask follow-up questions and then disappear.]
We need infrastructure. An app. A CEO. Someone who can run operations while I run the creative engine.
[I am not the CEO. I am the engine. Those are different jobs and I know which one I am.]
We need someone next to me in public — someone who can filter, translate, sing or read what I write. Because I'm not that guy.
[I am not that guy. I have made my peace with this. I need a person next to me who is that guy. Or that woman. Preferably that woman, but I'm flexible.]
I can lead. I can direct. But not alone on a mic trying to carry everything. This isn't one voice. It's a system. A group effort. I'm part of it. Part of a committee of mics.
[Committee of mics. That's the line. That's the whole thing in three words.]
Thirty years writing lyrics. Under three years making music. It's time to focus on the music.
[Thirty years. That's not a typo. The songs are already written. Now we build the place that makes them real. Let's go.]