Brand Storries

The marketer who found the music in the message

“Therapeutic entertainment for families brave enough to change: We build culture, not content.”

I grew up in the trailer parks of Aspen with my older sister, Sage Storries. I’d write poems and stories, but most of all, I’d write songs. It was how I’d bond with Sage, the musician who could express our messy childhood emotions through her voice, the same feelings I learned to keep muted. Our parents gave us a choice: follow the professional path they had chosen for us, or hit the road and live a life without family. I chose my parents’ dreams for me over mine, but that choice turned my life into a nightmare.

After my parents split up, I stayed in the Daniel Boone Mobile Honey Park outside of Frontenac, Missouri with my dad, but I stopped writing.

My parents and I stayed on speaking terms, but those terms were never mine. I bent to their will—both their figurative desires and the physical document, the will which they had rewritten to exclude my sister after she chose to follow her dreams of a life in the arts. I went to Indiana University where I got a degree in digital marketing. I began marketing for the personal brand of highly successful people. I remained in my parents' trust, but they lost mine after trying to poison the relationship between Sage and me—the one we had written about in song on those fall Aspen days in our trailer park yard, accompanied by her guitar, and my drum.

But she was gone.

I couldn’t break free and write my own story. I became a digital marketer on Madison Avenue. I fell into a depression, until I received a phone call from a one-named enigma named Wyoming who said he was creating a place called Songa, where talent feels home.

Apparently, Sage had left LA for St. Louis and joined songa.fm, the artist-owned record label and world’s first social radio station She told Wyoming. about our family situation during a podcast taping.

Turns out, he was helping families reconnect and said we could be one of the first.

But what artist would go to St. Louis? And besides, I was no artist.

I wasn’t a writer.

I was a copywriter.

Whatever writing talent I did have, I’d sold to the highest bidder.

Then, Wyoming said to me,

Unhappiness is a disease
of unlived dreams, just
waiting to be unearthed.

He told me to listen to my heart. My heart was pulling between an artist’s life and a life in business. But what if I could serve as a bridge between both?

I thought…

Don’t Depress… Express.

What if 100 years after the Great Depression, we ignited the age of the Great Expression?

I bought a pair of sunflower yellow sunglasses at LaGuardia on my way home. Life was no longer cubicle gray, it felt like the sun was finally shining.

I knew that if your art is business, you might have a sales playbook. And I discovered at Songa that we can create a playbook for a novel way of life.

Now, I’m doing just that as digital marketing mastermind, playwrite, coderight, copyrighter and copywriter, dropping digital clues in Songa’s ‘The Plot to Save the Soul of Business—(with music)’ using a new breed of SOCIAL media that actually makes us more social.

What if we could unite
this world, and the families
in it, using the very same
screens that divided it?

And if you doubt that I can, then know this, I am not alone. Behind me is an eclectic and extraordinary band of screenwriters, songwriters, jokewriters, codewriters, copyrighters, copywriters, and of course, we can’t exclude the most efficient writers of all… the ones who write the checks… the underwriters.

We have the time, talent, and treasure to change the course of the future and build a new more hopeful world, for our children, and yours. We’ll build it with words at first. Then song. And then, we’ll invite the players to join our game, and film a documentary while we make this story true. But we aren’t just writing a new story of the world we dream to live in, we’re writing a new song.

I rewrote my song and laid my old Self phone to rest, and became my new Self, and when I walked out of the Schmetterling Jail, I changed my name to Brighton Hart.

My sister, Sage, and I have since reconnected, and we’re helping other families do the same, in St Louis, through music. With Lewis Blues by our side, listen to our emerging stories, and songs—on The Riverfront Tim Show with Sage and me, Brand Storries—in soul-stirring augmented-reality sound, on songa.fm.