I Built an AI Music Artist to Help You Calm Down. Here’s Why.
Most people who know me can probably place me in one of four boxes.
There’s the sports version of me. Rugby, track, football. From Wellesley high school and my years at Bates College, to playing men’s club rugby with teams like the Boston Irish Wolfhounds. Then there’s the media and music version. I’ve recently shared some of my high school and general music experience. Freelance video production, filming and video work with CBS MaxPreps, and the years I spent roaming the Massachusetts hip hop scene with companies like UnderGroundHipHop.com back when they were an actual brick-and-mortar store, before the brand changed hands.
Third is the business and self-starter version. This one has been in the mix for a long time, before and after everything else. Freelance work, financial literacy advocacy, helping people build credit, and eventually starting my own ventures like MarketingAndSalesHelp.com and AdamHelper. That same energy carried into my time as a financial wellbeing coach at the nonprofit Operation HOPE, which we’ll touch on later. And then there’s the corporate version, about a decade in sales and marketing, which honestly overlaps a lot with the self-starter side since that entrepreneurial thread was running the whole time.
Those are the versions of me that tend to show up in conversation. But there’s a fifth thread that’s been running underneath all of it, quietly and steadily, since maybe as far back as seventh grade… possibly earlier.
The spiritual side. The mindful side. Whatever you want to call it. Consciousness, intuition, presence.
Where It Started
I remember talking to a classmate saying, “I’m a king.” Some of them thought it was arrogance. Others probably thought I was losing it. But the few people who actually talked to me about what I meant understood: we’re all kings and queens. We’re all connected. Gods on earth. We’re all more than we think we are.
I honestly can’t remember where I first picked that up. Whether it was someone in my life, a movie, a conversation I overheard. But it stuck. And it’s been growing with me ever since.
Having some Jamerican roots and growing up in the suburbs during the ’90s and 2000s, I was absorbing a pretty wide spectrum of music and ideas. Phish. Dave Matthews Band. Bob Marley. The Roots. KRS-One. Arrested Development. When you’re listening to jam bands and conscious hip hop in the same week, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that concepts like enlightenment, interconnectedness, and mindfulness start to feel less abstract and more like something worth paying attention to.
A Quick Sidebar: Consciousness, Mindfulness, and Spirituality
These three words get used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing, even though they’re related.
Mindfulness is the simplest one. It just means paying attention to what’s happening right now, on purpose, without judging it. When you notice the feeling of your feet on the floor or catch yourself zoning out and gently come back, that’s mindfulness.
Consciousness is bigger. It’s the fact that you’re aware at all. That you can think, feel, observe, and know that you’re observing. It’s the “you” behind everything you experience. Some people think of it as just brain activity. Others think it goes deeper than that.
Spirituality is about meaning and connection. It’s the sense that there’s something larger going on, whether you call that God, energy, the universe, or just the feeling of being deeply connected to other people and the world around you. You don’t need religion to be spiritual, though religion can be one path to it.
Think of it like this: mindfulness is a skill, consciousness is the fact that you exist and can experience anything, and spirituality is the search for what all of it means. They overlap, but each one has its own lane.
The Practice (In Progress)
I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m some kind of guru. I have my yoga mat and I do my thing here and there. Eventually I’ll make it daily. I’ve never done a formal retreat, but that’s on my list for the near future.
One thing I do consistently is say “Thank You” before I eat each meal. It’s small, but it sets a tone. I’m also working on building in daily or weekly vision and gratitude sessions, even if it’s just a few seconds. Sometimes that means thinking about the day or week ahead with intention. Other times it means looking back and being reflective and thankful for what happened, good or bad. It doesn’t have to be a whole production. A few honest seconds can shift your entire perspective.
I also have a vision board set as my desktop background that I pretty much see every day. It includes things like peace, health, wellness, fitness, and more, along with a reminder of my underlying goal and focus for the year. It’s not complicated, but when something is in front of you that often, it starts to shape how you move through your day whether you realize it or not.
At a Bates College reunion, I jumped into a yoga session led by a former trackmate’s mother. It was great, and it was also a humbling reminder that I’m getting older. My strength and balance were getting tested like I was back in the 2000s trying to juke folks on the rugby pitch or the football field.
When I worked remotely at Operation HOPE as a financial wellbeing coach, there were a couple of organization-wide virtual meditation sessions that I participated in. Short, simple, and surprisingly effective at resetting the day.
None of this is a perfectly disciplined practice. But it’s real, and it’s been building for over half my life.
So Why DJ Calm Down?
Here’s what I keep coming back to.
I love music. Creating it, listening to it, expressing through it. I also love building things. Not just products, but experiences. Creative ideas that improve conditions and produce real results. And the intersection of those passions led me somewhere I didn’t fully expect.
But there’s also a practical and necessary reason for this.
If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you know I’m usually in one of two modes: grinding on work (building products, serving clients, launching businesses) or speaking on political and social injustices, the systemic problems that most people would rather scroll past. Both of those are important to me, and I’m not stopping either one. But you can’t pour from an empty cup, and honestly, it gets tiresome when every gear you have is set to “push.” You need a yin to the yang. DJ Calm Down is part of that balance for me, and I think a lot of you could use that balance too.
Meet DJ Calm Down, my new AI music artist and persona.
More specifically, DjCalmDown.com is a uniquely immersive experience I’ve built to let you enjoy peaceful music while helping you let go of stress. Whether you need to relax, focus, or sleep more comfortably, that’s what this is for.
Here’s the thing about stress that I think doesn’t get talked about enough from a systems perspective: we’ve built professional environments where stress isn’t a side effect, it’s practically a feature. Depending on the industry, you might be stressed the second you walk through the door. Small business owners, freelancers, professionals keeping the lights on… stress is baked into the operating system of modern work. And yet the tools we have to manage it are often either expensive, time-consuming, or both.
DJ Calm Down is free. The music is original. The desktop and mobile experience was inspired by Marc Balaban’s pixelthoughts.co, a concept I’ve always admired for its simplicity and effectiveness. On DjCalmDown.com, I’ll be sharing new music alongside blog posts on meditative and sleep trends, science-backed research, useful products you might benefit from, and relevant YouTube content, updated daily and weekly.
It just went live yesterday, so give me a few weeks to fill it with the full range of collections and content I have planned. But the foundation is there.
What This Is Really About
Whether you need new sounds to get through your business operations work, you’re finally sitting down to build out your marketing strategy for the year (or you want to reach out to me about that), maybe you just need background music to get the dishes done or the house cleaned, you want to decompress after a long day, or you want to try something different to help you actually sleep, DJ Calm Down is built to meet you there.
But here’s the broader question I keep thinking about:
We spend a ton of energy optimizing our productivity systems, our sales funnels, our marketing strategies, the mechanics of output. But how much infrastructure have we actually built around the input side – you know, your innerbeing? Around the conditions that allow a person to think clearly, create freely, and sustain the energy it takes to build something meaningful over time?
What would it look like if we designed for calm the same way we design for conversion?
I don’t have the full answer yet. But DJ Calm Down is one piece of how I’m exploring and showing it.
Check out the experience at DjCalmDown.com. Take five minutes, put on a track, and let something drift away. If it helps you, share it with someone else who could use it. And if you want to talk about the marketing strategy you’ve been putting off while you were stressed, you know where to find me at MarketingAndSalesHelp.com.
