Sonic Legacy
In their own voice, from journals, letters, messages and recordings. Or in the voices of the people who knew them. Every line in it was really said, or really written, by a real person. Nothing is invented.
This is not an interview. It is a gift.
It is Lindsay, alone, filming herself as she hears her album for the first time, and then speaking at the end, while all of it is still raw.
She lost her ex-husband Ryan suddenly, after years in which the two of them had found their way back to each other. What she was left holding was complicated in ways most people never have to explain to anybody.
She agreed to make this public so that other people could understand what it is actually like to have a Sonic Legacy album made for them. We are grateful to her for it.
Twelve minutes. If you are deciding whether any of this is for you, they will tell you more than the rest of this page.
If you are reading this, death is not an abstraction. It has either just happened, or it happened a while ago and has not finished happening, or it is coming and you can see it from here.
There is no correct way to be in that. Some people want to talk for three hours. Some cannot say the person's name yet. Some are furious, some are practical, some feel almost nothing and are frightened by that. None of those is the wrong reaction and none of them will be treated as one.
Everything on this page has been written as carefully as we know how. If any of it lands wrong, say so. We will listen, and nothing here is fixed.
We do not assume your experience resembles anyone else's, because it does not. Every album made here has been made differently, and the first conversation is entirely about understanding what happened to you and what you actually want, rather than fitting you to something that worked for somebody else.
What we have is a craft: turning a person's real words into music that can be listened to for the rest of a life. Whether that serves grieving, or remembrance, or celebration, or legacy, is yours to decide and not ours to name for you.
You do not have to be composed, and you do not have to wait until you are. Grief is a powerful time to do this, because nothing is being performed and the words come out raw. It is also a hard time, and a vulnerable one. So it is your call, not ours.
Whoever sits with you is there to hold the space, not to keep you steady. Crying through an interview is expected and welcome, and it does not spoil the recording. Feeling nothing at all is equally fine and equally usable. And if today is not the day, it can wait. Nothing here has to happen now.
If there is a date, say so in the first line and it will be built around. Some of this can move fast. Some of it should not.
Two things can happen in the first week, and neither of them requires you to be articulate.
You can send their words. Journals, letters, notebooks, messages, anything at all they wrote in their own hand or their own phone. Nothing needs sorting first.
Nothing physical needs to leave your house. A scan is enough, and so is a photograph of a page. We never ask for originals, and nothing irreplaceable is ever posted anywhere.
Or someone else can speak. Often it is not the closest person who can talk first. A sibling, an old friend, a grandchild. One voice is enough to begin.
The album can grow afterwards. What is made in the first three weeks does not have to be the final thing, and it usually is not.
Time changes what this is. It stops being an emergency and becomes something else: a record, deliberately made, of a person who is no longer here to make it themselves.
There is no expiry on it. Two years, ten, thirty. People do this for a parent they lost as a child and for a grandparent they never met, working entirely from letters.
What changes with time is who can speak. Early on, most people cannot. Later, almost everyone can, and the album gets larger and stranger and more accurate because more than one person remembers.
An anniversary is often the reason. So is a birth, or a house being sold, or a box being opened.
Nothing physical needs to leave your house. A scan of each page is enough, however many pages there are.
This is the only one where the person can be in the room. It changes everything about what the album is.
They can make it themselves. Their life, their learning, what they think they leave behind, in their own words, said out loud while they still have the voice to say it. Nobody is guessing. Nobody is reconstructing.
Or it can be made for them, as a gift. A daughter for her father. A husband for a wife who is dying. This is delicate and it must be their choice as much as yours, and the first conversation is about that and nothing else.
The practical point is unsentimental and it matters: there is a window, and it closes. Illness takes the voice before it takes the person. Doing this earlier than feels necessary is always better than doing it later than it was possible.
Not written about them. Made of them. Every line in the finished album came out of a real mouth or a real notebook, restructured and set to music. Nothing is invented and nothing is embellished.
There are two sources. Most albums use both.
Theirs
Journals, letters, notebooks, emails, messages, a speech they once gave, a recipe card with a note on the back.
Where enough of this exists, the album is in their voice. Their cadence, their phrases, the words they reached for. People who knew them recognise it immediately, and that recognition is the whole of it.
Yours
An interview with the people who knew them. One person, or several, or a room.
Up to ten people, and there is a reason for the number: ten people is roughly a ten song album, one voice at the centre of each. Beyond that nobody gets a song of their own and the thing dilutes.
It is not a tribute. It is the person, still talking.
What every album here is trying to be
The Hummingbird's Tote (Gold in the Cracks)
After a death · Eight tracks · June 2026Lindsay's album, for Ryan. Her words, her account, her forgiveness. Not a summary of a life, but one person's telling of what passed between them. She is the woman in the film in track 01.
Juntos (Alexander)
Before, while he is here · Three tracks · April 2026Made for a child living with a serious heart condition, and for his family, while he is still here to hear it. This is the other door on this page and it is the one people think of least: an album does not have to wait for a death to be worth making.
Whichever is possible. If it is an interview it is about an hour per person, recorded, and the questions borrow your words rather than supplying new ones.
Metaphors, repeated images, the things a person said without noticing they were saying them. This is where an album stops being a summary and starts being a portrait.
A songwriter normally has the whole dictionary. Here there is only what came out of one mouth. That constraint is the discipline and it is the reason the result sounds like them.
What they played in the car. What was on at the wedding. What they sang badly in the kitchen.
Usually two to four weeks, depending on how many voices there are and how much there is to read. Cover, lyric book, and the files. Publishing it to streaming platforms is optional and entirely yours to decide, and most families keep it private.
The album is yours. Play it, share it, keep it private, use it however you want. None of that is our business once it is in your hands.
It also comes with guidance on how to use it to process grief. What has worked for the people who have done this before, drawn from more than twenty years of guiding people through major life transitions.
None of it is compulsory and nobody checks. Plenty of people simply listen, and that is a complete way to do this.
An album normally takes two to four weeks.
But death does not give notice. Sometimes it is Monday and you learn the funeral is on Saturday. If that is where you are, say so in your first line and put the date at the top.
We will not promise a date we cannot hold. But we will tell you straight away what is possible in the time you actually have, and we have made special arrangements for special situations before.
Every line in them came out of a real mouth or a real notebook, and nothing in them was invented. Two of them are the two you can hear further up this page. One made after a death, one made while the person is still here.
The rest of the catalogue is on Spotify and Apple Music. You will hear a great deal there that is not a memorial. We also make albums for weddings, anniversaries, births and other occasions, so the range is wide.
One notebook and one grandchild is a different job from four hundred letters and a family of nine. This is the honest shape of it, and you see the number before you give us a single detail.
Tell us what is happening for you, where you are with it, or what happened practically. In your own words. Everything else can be worked out afterwards.
Not a queue and not an automatic receipt. We will write back as soon as we can, on the channel you chose and no other. If it is the middle of the night where you are, it will be waiting when you wake up.
Sonic Legacy is part of Sonic Rewrite. Words are confidential and are never used, quoted or published anywhere without written permission, and that applies to the person who commissioned the album and to the person it is about.