Music, Therapy, and Notes from the Road

06.09.2025

Music, Therapy, and Notes from the Road

by Jon Bryant

The title of my most recent album was fully intentional. It’s been five years since I released a full-length LP but composing Therapy Notes was a therapeutic process for me at a time when I really needed it. As a musician influenced by Jeff Buckley and the band Bon Iver, to name a few, it’s fairly obvious that my genre is an alternative, folksy, melancholic, introspective, personal one but I don’t want people to listen to my stuff and be sad. I want them to be hopeful and inspired and feel ok with being vulnerable.

Mental health issues and dealing with conditions like anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, and depression, which I’ve been struggling with on and off for about 12 years, can make you feel incredibly vulnerable. Well, they certainly made me feel that way and I’ve finally accepted that vulnerability is a part of who I am as a musician, an actor, a spouse, and a human being.

Therapy Notes (released April 2025) is a deeply personal, creative journey that I hope resonates with so many people but especially with those who know what it feels like to experience a mental health crisis. I worked on the album during a hard time and it offered me some self-therapy and self-reflection. I was going through a period of artistic and personal uncertainty with a divorce, the canceling and delaying of tours, mourning lost opportunities and people, and a general sense of dread that came with existential thoughts and feelings about what the future might hold and doubts about my own self-worth and trust in myself.

Depression has a way of making you feel alone. It eats away at your confidence and hope and fills you with despair, fear, and apprehension. It doesn’t help that as an indie musician I spend lots of time on the road, in hotels and motels by myself, staying in far-flung places, one night here, one night there, playing on stages where a serotonin rush lasts the length of the show but dissipates quickly back in my room. One of my songs, Hollow, is about being on the road in a state of panic and depression, particularly after a show when the thrill of the serotonin wears off, and I’m left to the silence of my mind and the hollowness of another motel room. And it’s not that I’m afraid or embarrassed to experience that but rather the importance of acknowledging how I am feeling and accepting the good with the bad.

I don’t blame my depression and anxiety on being a musician or my lifestyle. I realize now that mental health issues are something I have to live with, that they are a part of my makeup, whether genetic or environmental or triggered by specific events or situations. Rather than trying to push my mental health struggles out of my mind, I’m going to use these feelings of vulnerability to explore who I am, what I need and want, and how to live fully as I am.

Having amassed 100 million-plus streams with my music, releasing a handful of albums, as well as a number of songs and EPs, and landing acting and voice over roles in relatively major productions, I might seem like I have it all together. Yes, I’m successful enough and what I have I am grateful for but mental health distress is not something we can just snap out of or get over because things are going well in our lives. Yet we can do things to alleviate the pain - I exercise, try to eat well, get out even if I don’t feel like it, see friends and family, meditate, and use music as a way to process and relieve some of that grief and anguish.

I’m thankful that my label, Nettwerk Music Group, put me in touch with ADAA and I wanted to share my story for several reasons. While there is certainly more discussion around mental health now, there is still stigma and shame and people are continuing to suffer in silence. ADAA provides a platform to share stories and gives us the opportunity to acknowledge our mental health struggles. Understanding the importance of connection and how that connectivity can at least alleviate some of the symptoms of anxiety and depression is crucial. I want my fans, listeners, and readers of this story to know that. I still have so much to learn and ADAA is a good place to educate ourselves and others.