ACT 1. A Prodigal Son's Return Home (to a "happy" studio)

First, I lost faith in God, and later, my Self.

Some find God in a cathedral. I found Him again in a song I didn’t mean to write.

I’m Lewis Blews, the music director of The “Happy” Studio @ The WORLD of SONGA.

I grew up Catholic in St. Louis, raised on stories of Miles Davis and a city that once sang from porches, church basements, and second-story windows. My father was a jazz musician—quiet, reclusive, devout in his own way. We haven’t spoken in years. There was a time I considered becoming a man of the cloth—leading the youth music program at the cathedral just down the street from St. Louis University. But somewhere between tech conferences and broken tour buses, I lost the part of me that believed in sacred things. Church became a metaphor, then a memory. Music replaced prayer. Performance replaced presence.

I didn’t just run away from my faith. I ran away from my home, too.

I left St. Louis when it felt like the music had stopped. I couldn’t catch a break in my hometown, so I took my songs and went searching. Nashville. San Francisco. New York. I chased the spotlight, then the check, then the bottle. During the dotcom boom, I tried my hand in tech and made a fortune. Then I lost everything. Including my Self.

In San Francisco, I built a marketing tech company that helped launch the first iPhone campaign. My claim to fame? I helped Apple sell the future. My curse? That same iPhone killed everything I built. When Apple dropped Flash and forced the world into the App Store, my clients vanished. My business collapsed. And I went with it.

It killed more than my company—it helped kill the soul of music. Tech platforms turned songs into data points. What once lived in church basements and smoky bars got shrink-wrapped for ad placement.

Art became optimized. Song became commerce. And the holiness my father heard in every note? It got buried beneath swipe gestures and autoplay.

That’s when I started calling it the iScreen.

Not because it connected us—but because it didn’t.

As our screens got smaller, so did our gatherings. Until our screens got so small… we didn’t gather at all.

Live music died with it.

I even pitched a class-action lawsuit against Apple for false advertising. Still might. They said the iPhone would bring us together—but what they delivered was high-definition isolation. Ever since parents started buying their teenagers iPhones, they stopped calling. The world stopped singing. We stopped looking up.

But in that wreckage, I found something better.

On a recent visit home, I found a pair of crooked yellow sunglasses from a Tower Grove pawn shop. A dusty guitar. A memory of home. And a voice I hadn’t heard in years: my own.

I’m not a freestyler. I’m a real-time songwriter. That means I write what’s true in the moment—not for applause, not for algorithms, but for healing. Sometimes it’s a whole song in a single take. Sometimes it’s a whisper in the dark that becomes a roomful of people harmonizing like they remembered something ancient.

In the silence that followed, I picked up Daddy’s old guitar and made a vow: to heal the town that cast me out. Not for the charts. Not for the industry. Just for the truth.

Everything changed last New Year’s Eve, and when I met a one-named engine named Wyoming at the bodega at the intersection of Church Street and 3rd Avenue in Nashville. Or maybe it was the day I met his half-brother, Forbes Nash.

Wyoming handed me a page torn from what he called “The Plot to Save the Soul of Business.”

On it, a line: “As the sun sets upon his past, out sets the son, upon his future.”

And beneath it: a code—2112.

He said, “That’s the door code to The WORLD of SONGA,” and he pointed across the street, “Come in any time. But know this. My children are in that house. Bring friends, but don’t bring anyone who’d do anything in that house that wouldn’t make your momma proud.”

I’d arrived on a mission to save the soul of music. Wyoming and his brother were trying to save something deeper—the soul of business (with music).

Not business as usual. Business as belonging.

Together, we started SONGA.FM—a private social radio network that’s 100% REAL, designed to create sustainable income for working musicians and storytellers who never fit the algorithm. No ads. No tracking. Just rhythm, story, and connection.

It is art that may be the only way to get our community, communicating.

So, Wyoming called me home to St. Louis. To rewrite its story.

But St. Louis didn’t just need a new story—it needed a new song.

So I wrote one.

It’s called Our Town.

The first time we rehearsed it in front of a live studio audience, the saxophone hit. The crowd lit up. People didn’t just clap—they cried. They remembered.

That night, the city sang back.

This isn’t just my comeback story.

It’s St. Louis’s.

And that song—Our Town—it’s more than a song.

It’s a rebellion.

It’s a homecoming.

It’s the beginning of a new verse—for me, for St. Louis, and maybe even for the man who handed me that old guitar.

Listen to “Daddy’s Old Guitar,” written live
in The Family Room @ Songa Studios ST LOUIS.

🎭 Curious who’s shaping this story?
🎶 Below the paywall, you’ll meet the Storries—
the musical siblings behind what comes next.

Some characters even have their own blogs:
🧢 ex-billionaire.org
🌍 theworldofsonga.com
🏕️ themillionairescampfire.org

👇 Or just keep going — ACT 2 continues at the bottom of the page.