Creating a legacy
A long reflection on fatherhood and digital media.
Note: This Saturday post is in a different format. Pardon my vulnerability and lack of brevity.
You may not have heard of Jon Bellion, but you’ve heard his songs. Bellion is credited as the writer on a string of mega-hits, including, but not limited to:
“Trumpets” by Jason Derulo
“Holy” by Justin Bieber ft. Chance the Rapper
“Seven” by Jung Kook ft. Latto
“Waffle House” by The Jonas Brothers
and so, so so many more…
I was first introduced to Bellion in 2014 after his “The Definition” mixtape came out. A fraternity brother was driving us somewhere (probably to pick up beer) and played the song “Ooh” off that mixtape, and I was instantly hooked. Since then, I’ve seen Bellion in concert twice, bought every vinyl record he’s put out, and even entered my wedding reception to his song “Overwhelming.”
As a noted superfan, it felt like a divine blessing that Bellion returned from a six-year hiatus to release his third album, “Father Figure,” about becoming a dad, two months after my own son was born.
The album released at midnight on Wednesday, and I was fortunate to be able to listen through the full fourteen tracks while I bottle-fed Theo in the middle of the night. It’s a wonderful, beautiful album. As a new dad, “Why” and “My Boy” are the standouts, and they led me to ugly cry (in the best way) while looking down at my sleeping son’s face.
“Father Figure” is, in part, an exploration of Bellion’s legacy and what lessons he hopes to leave his three sons as he grapples with his obsession with creating a brilliant, lasting body of work, but also his desire to be a present father who his sons can lean on and look up to.
The future and one’s own legacy are inevitable topics that enter the brain once you’re holding a newborn. As someone who has written for a living for most of my career, I’m fortunate to have much of my thoughts, opinions, and lessons currently publicly available in the form of op-eds, articles, quotes, TikToks, and of course, this Substack. But while these things exist now, and are available via a simple Google search for my name, there is no guarantee that these writings (or Google!) will continue to exist or be accessible by the time Theo is using the computer – or whatever technology replaces computers 5-10 years from now.
This means that, currently, my own legacy – the parts of me that I wish to record for my posterity – live completely online, and are subject to the changing culture and infrastructure of the web, which is currently under a rapid reorganization, thanks to our AI overlords. With Google becoming unusable and every single website and app pushing their own version of A.I. on every user, the internet is on track to look vastly different in just a few short months than it has looked for the majority of our time scrolling. I call this The Infopocalypse, when most of the information currently accessible to us will be drowned in A.I. slop and misinformation. It’s coming much sooner than I think most of us are ready for.
I’ve begun to use vinyl records as a way to soothe my son to sleep when he gets particularly fussy. No matter the genre, something about the crackling audio helps calm his flailing limbs even better than the best swaddle. We’ve listened to Art Blakey’s “Jazz Messengers,” Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” the aforementioned Jon Bellion records, and so much more.
While I also pay for a Spotify membership, I’ve become hyper aware of the drawbacks to relying on a single source for all of my music needs. Spotify, just like any other web-hosted platform, is at risk of server issues, hacking, login problems, and a whole host of other potential problems that would hinder our ability to log in and listen to the music we love. Plus they keep changing their UI, and it makes using their app more and more frustrating with each new iteration.
These frustrations are not simply limited to the platforms that host music. Each year on New Years Day, I watch all three Lord of the Rings movies, the extended editions. It’s my favorite day of the year, and the total viewing time is just under 12 hours, taking up almost every waking (hungover) moment. For the past eight years, I’ve relied on the digital versions of these movies that I purchased from Amazon Prime. But I don’t own those pieces of media, something Amazon makes clear in their terms and conditions:
Note: Buying a title adds it to My Stuff and will generally be available to you for download or streaming, but may become unavailable due to licensing restrictions or for other limited reasons.
For fear of opening the Amazon Prime app on January 1st and finding that the three movies are no longer available for ‘other limited reasons,’ I’ve now got a DVD player and I’m currently searching for an LOTR extended-edition box set that isn’t over $100.
They’ve taken our digital books, too. Earlier this year, Amazon changed the fine print under the purchase button on Kindle books to clarify that you are not purchasing a digital copy of a book, but rather a license for the content of the book.
Going forward, it’s now safe to assume that any content you have spent money on digitally can be swiftly and legally ripped away from you without your knowledge or consent. Physical media is your only chance to truly own the things you consume.
Jon Bellion has always been an innovator in the music industry, and the rollout of this latest album was no different. Today, big artists will typically rely on social media algorithms and user-generated dances to promote upcoming music, but Bellion took a different route. In September of 2024, he posted a clip from one of the tracks on the album to his social media, and pointed followers toward a URL that allowed them to sign up for a mailing list. That list remained dormant until February 2025, when those who signed up (like me) received an email with the subject line “6 years is long enough…” (6 years being the amount of time since he last dropped an album).
From there, Bellion dropped early teasers, videos, and full tracks to those who signed up for the newsletter, creating a targeted rollout focused on his fans, rather than “the matrix,” as he called it. Music videos were first shared exclusively with subscribers via a downloadable .mp4, rather than dropped on Instagram or YouTube.
This was, in part, because Bellion had broken up with his record label, but mainly, according to him, because it allowed him to balance being a father with being a popular artist.
“Just wanted to thank you guys... Even during a rollout and releasing music I can balance my family life and take a break to be present with my family. That’s the real utility of the forum and email. It puts this all in a place that’s healthy for me.”
-A short email from Jon Bellion to his email list subscribers
As I’ve written about before, Theo was born just three days after I lost my job to the 2025 mayoral election here in St. Louis. I had been serving as the former mayor’s communications director, and the current mayor had no interest in keeping me on board (understandably – I had to get very political during the campaign).
The expectation of the comms director is to be on-call 24/7, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to work 16 hour days and take calls at all hours of the day and night. As much as I believed in the Jones administration, it was divine intervention that I transitioned away from the high-stress, high-adrenaline environment of Rm. 200 right as I became a father. Now, I work from home as a consultant, and I work for myself, allowing me to set my own schedule and turn down work if I want more time for my family. It also allows my wife to comfortable go back to work as an OB/GYN resident without us having to shell out nearly $2,000/month for daycare.
I still occasionally feel that my time in city government was unjustly cut short, and that there was still so much left for me to accomplish in my former job. Having once been at the table when important decisions were made about our city and our region, and now being just some guy who writes on Substack, I also struggle with balancing my need to contribute to the world around me and my need to be present father. But then Theo makes a cute noise, or smiles up at me, and all those feelings dissipate instantly.
While I’m grateful for the time I get to spend with my son, I’m also acutely aware that he won’t really remember it. But this is an important time. It’s important for the City of St. Louis, the State of Missouri, and the United States. What happens and has been happening is important for Theo to one day be able to contextualize and understand, and the best lens I have to offer is my own. I’m grateful that enough people read these posts that it’s worth it for me to keep writing them. You’re helping me build a legacy. I’ve been downloading these Substack posts as .doc files onto a hard drive, with the hope that maybe one day he’ll be interested in reading them.
I’ve also taken to writing in a journal that my wife bought me, a journal that has the explicit goal of being a physical object that I can one day pass on to Theo so he can get to know who his father was at the beginning of his life.
I’m also buying more vinyl records, more DVDs, and more physical books (from my favorite local bookstore, Left Bank). The goal is to build a big enough collection of physical media to pass down for my son to own and get a better understanding of the important cultural moments that his parents lived through, and how we felt about them.
Finally, I’m encouraging everyone who hears my voice or reads my words to start their own physical media collection, as well. Maybe you don’t have kids, maybe your kids are grown, but right now, our culture has put all of our art and words and creativity into platforms that then gate keep it, or feed it to an A.I. algorithm to be remade and spit back out, like a Frankenstein’s monster of our most vulnerable parts.
If you’re looking for a place to start, might I recommend buying Jon Bellion’s new album on vinyl? You can pre-order it now, and they’ll ship in August.
Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend.
Weekend reads
Searching for Bobbie Gentrie (Substack, Sarah Kendzior)
I’ve been reading a lot Sarah’s writing as I gear up to get her new book, The Last American Road Trip, from Left Bank Books later today. This most recent Substack post is a haunting reflection on the callousness of American culture, where every day seems to be “another sleepy dusty Delta day.”Europe Built Trains. America Built Highways and Regret (NY Times, gift article)
Dan Richards reflects on just how bad the present and future of rail travel is in the U.S. compared to Europe. One of the more jarring examples of how behind we truly are is the comparison of trip times. London to Berlin is about 12 hours by car, less than nine by train. Meanwhile, New York to Chicago is 13 hours by car, more than 20 by train.