Pixar needs to grant Jon Bellion his dream

One night, my cousin Ryan sent me a text that changed my life as I previously knew it. “Listen to Jon Bellion,” he wrote to me. “I really feel like you’ll enjoy his lyrics. He puts his heart and soul into every song. I think you’ll like him.”

Bellion, 25, is a multi-talented musician signed to Visionary Music Group and Capitol Records. He still lives at his parents’ house. His accompanying nine-piece band, Beautiful Mind, is made up of his best friends from college. Bellion had promised them that if his music career took off, he would bring them along. He kept that promise, and now things are trending up.

Bellion has been very outspoken about his dream of working on and scoring a Pixar film since the June 10 release of his debut studio album The Human Condition. He has invested $50,000 of his own money into the art campaign that accompanies each song on his album in hopes of capturing Pixar’s attention. If he, of all people, is struggling to earn Pixar’s attention and capture a lifelong dream, what does that mean for the rest of us?

It means that none of us are immune to the human condition—wanting to get more out of ourselves—and achieving dreams is never promised. Our world is so, so big with so, so many talented and deserving people clawing along with me for one of the few seats at a dreamer’s table.

I need Pixar to give Jon Bellion his seat.
After reading Ryan’s text, I started devouring every piece of Bellion’s music – the hook he wrote for Eminem and Rihanna’s song “The Monster” in 2013, his three self-released mixtapes and The Human Condition.  Ryan was wrong. I did not like Jon Bellion. I loved him. Most of all, I needed his music to enter my life and talk to my heart at this particular time in my life.

This time last year, I was holding my mother’s hand while she cried in one of our living room’s recliners. It was late in the night, or early in the morning, and she kept asking me the same questions: “Am I moving? I feel like I’m moving. Am I falling? I feel like I’m falling.”
“You’re OK, Mom,” I’d reassure her. She was experiencing vertigo—an inner-ear disorder that simulates a rapid spinning sensation.
I have learned over the last seven months since graduating from the University of Missouri that waking up every day with your goals for the future spinning at warp speed while your reality stays sedentary is an especially dizzying case of vertigo. I have a case of Young Person Feeling Like The World Is Too Big and I Am Too Small.
One week after The Human Condition was released, Bellion was on Sway Calloway’s Sway in the Morning and helped put me at ease.

“I got that feeling, that energy, off your music,” Sway told Jon. “Like, this dude cares about the mix, the mastering process, the levels, the song structure.”

“That’s all that matters,” Jon responded. “That’s all that matters. My Twitter followers and Instagram comments and who knows who and all that stuff, it all means nothing to me. The reason I’m in this room is because my music is very dope. That’s what gets me to talk to my idol, one of the personalities that I grew up listening to.”

A few minutes later, Bellion explained to Sway his love for Pixar. “When I’m in the studio, I have Pixar movies running 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Bellion said. “… Pixar is this accessible thing where parents are bringing their children to the movie theaters but then there are these little things that the parents can appreciate. But the product, the colors, and the pallet of the entire thing is just so—there’s never been a time where you’ve seen a Pixar movie and haven’t been like, ‘Holy crap.’

“Look at these colors and the situation and the genius behind all of these things—simple but so detailed. And I feel like that’s very important in music making. I always want to build like an iPhone or something: it has to be simple and artistically sleek that a 4-year-old could scratch at it but also a grown human could be like, ‘Wow, I’m really getting something out of this situation.’”

He’s singing to us. He’s empowering us by preaching to work hard at things you love every day because you love them.

For the last seven months, I’ve been constantly applying for jobs and when I haven’t been doing that, I have been checking the social media accounts of people I admire—to see a life better than mine, to motivate me toward the fulfilling life in my imagination. Comparing myself. Asking myself things like, how are they there and I’m here? How can I do that?

In an interview Bellion recently did with Gabby Diaz, he said, “Social media is a thing that doesn’t exist, but we live in it. It’s like a new world and everybody has to pretend to be on all the time. … If I could just encourage you guys, don’t live on social media. Don’t take it to heart.”

With this in mind, I logged off social media and started writing. I started thinking about what I’ve learned from Jon’s music and felt myself wanting to just create because I love to create. Something of my own—writings, songs, experiences, anything—to share with the world. I heard what Bellion was preaching. We must stop envying everybody’s journey so much that we forget to participate in our own. We will never be able to jump through our screens and start living somebody else’s life, but we can always work as hard as possible to make our own lives worth sharing.

This, I believe, is the Jon Bellion Pixar movie that the world needs to see.