I spent Saturday afternoon making a song nobody asked for. I may be the only one who listens to it.
I want to be clear about why I’m telling you that. Not as a disclaimer. Not as false modesty. I’m telling you because the impulse to make it — before I could think clearly about what happened on February 28, 2026, before I could locate the correct analytical posture, before I could write anything coherent about Operation Epic Fury or the Strait of Hormuz or the geopolitical architecture of a world in which the United States and Israel struck Iran simultaneously across 500 sites — that impulse is itself the thing I want to examine.
I had read the assessment. The tables were precise. The acronyms were correct. “HVIs.” “SEAD missions.” “Decapitation logic.” The report told me that Khamenei was “neutralized in a pinpoint strike on his downtown Tehran residence.” It told me that an Israeli missile struck a girls’ elementary school in Minab, killing between 60 and 100 students, and that the IDF maintained it only targeted “military establishments.”
Sixty children.
The assessment noted this. It moved on.
I couldn’t move on. Not yet. Not until I made something that could hold it.
What the Song Was For
I’ve been writing a protest song every day — or close to it — since I decided I wanted to get good at this. That decision came with a specific admission: I am not yet good at this. The daily practice is the acknowledgment that mastery is somewhere ahead, not behind, and the only path runs through volume. Through putting rough work out before it’s ready, collecting small evidence of what lands and what doesn’t, adjusting, doing it again tomorrow.
This is what the 10,000 hours actually look like from the inside. Not the polished result — not Kingdom Must Come Down at 1.2 million views, not the tracks that made people stop scrolling — but the Saturday afternoon when you make something for an audience of possibly one because the alternative is silence, and silence felt like complicity.
The song I made was a call-and-response between my voice and the Liam Bear Brown persona I’ve built from two men named William: my father, who ran unarmed onto battlefields because his theology left him no other choice, and my own voice carrying his. The scaffold I borrowed from Edmund Sears, who wrote “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” in 1849 during the Mexican-American War — a Unitarian minister in Massachusetts encoding his dissent in a Christmas carol because that was the form that might survive. Still the mothers count the missing. Still they wait beside the door.
Two thousand years of the same song. And still we build the guns.
I wrote those words before I read the assessment. I would write them the same way after. What I didn’t know until I made the song was that making it was the only way I could then read the assessment clearly — could look at the word “neutralized” next to sixty children and understand what I was actually seeing. The song was how I held it. Not how I solved it. How I held it.
What Three Comments Teach You
Yesterday’s song got fifteen impressions and three comments. By the metrics that govern most creative decisions in 2026, that’s a rounding error. The algorithm files it under insufficient data and moves on.
But I read the three comments carefully, because that’s what daily practice requires: you pay attention to the small returns, because that’s where the feedback lives before volume arrives.
ShakalinSilver wrote: “Beautiful, made me cry, made me remember my mother and she worried for me while I was overseas.” One sentence. The song reached across the abstraction of geopolitical analysis and found the specific human inside the statistic. A mother at a door. A son overseas. The oldest story in every war ever fought, located again in something I made in an afternoon.
Tea Tea wrote two words: I love it. Those two words appeared voluntarily, attached to a piece of music that asks you to sit with sixty dead children. People don’t type “I love it” under things they’re merely tolerating.
Prithvi Vasireddy, a cloud AI developer, quoted Baldwin — “A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless” — and ended with: Please don’t stop the music, Professor.
Please. Don’t stop.
Here’s what I’ve learned about daily practice: you don’t get to decide in advance which day’s output will matter. You only get to decide whether you made it. The mattering happens in encounters you can’t control, with people you’ll never meet, at moments you can’t predict. A veteran cried. An engineer asked me not to stop.
That’s not a small return. That’s exactly what protest music is supposed to do.
Two Brothers
For the video, I made two soldiers. Different ethnicities. Same mustache. Same set of the jaw. Same direct gaze — not defiant, not frightened, just present. Looking at something beyond the frame that neither of them chose to look at.
The resemblance isn’t in the features exactly. It’s in the expression. Whatever made that face — the knowledge of what’s coming, the decision to stand anyway — made both faces the same way.
I didn’t plan it consciously. I was generating images and suddenly I was looking at brothers. Same uniform logic. Same war that didn’t ask either of them what they believed or who they loved or what they might have written if they’d been left alone to write it.
The song says if I killed you then I killed myself. These two faces say it without a word. You don’t need the Owen scaffolding. You don’t need the lyrics. You just need those faces next to each other and the question answers itself: who told you these men were enemies?
The general who sent them both doesn’t appear in either photograph. He never does. That absence is the whole argument.
This is what I mean when I say the daily practice teaches you things you couldn’t plan. I set out to make a video for a protest song. I ended up making a visual proof of the song’s central claim. The work knows something before you do. You just have to keep showing up until it shows you.
The Tradition I’m Walking Into
Protest music has always been made this way. Not polished, not committee-approved, not released after market research confirmed demand. It was made by people who needed to make it, distributed through whatever networks existed, discovered by the people who needed to find it.
Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” at Café Society in 1939. Columbia Records refused to release it. Commodore Records pressed 500 copies. By 1999, Time magazine called it the song of the century. The 10,000 hours between the Café Society premiere and the Time magazine retrospective are almost entirely invisible.
I’m in those invisible hours now. I know it. The point is not to pretend otherwise — the point is to keep accumulating them, because the practice generates enough volume that the essential songs have somewhere to come from. You can’t select in advance which one will be the one that matters. You can only make enough of them that the ones that matter have a chance of existing.
What the three comments prove is that some of these are landing before they’re supposed to. Before the views accumulate, before the algorithm takes notice, before the conventional markers of arrival appear.
What the Hours Actually Produce
There’s a line in “Strange Brothers” — the song I released this week, built on Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” — that I want to claim as evidence for what the practice is already producing:
Laid my better half up on a general’s shelf.
That line is not a rough draft line. It names a transaction cleanly: power extracts potential from people, uses what it needs, discards the rest. It doesn’t sentimentalize. It doesn’t editorialize. It just shows you the shelf.
That kind of precision doesn’t come from talent. It comes from doing this every day until the language gets tighter, until you stop reaching for the easy image and wait for the true one, until the daily accumulation of reps produces something you couldn’t have written at the beginning of the practice.
I’m not there yet across the board. Some days the song is rough and I know it’s rough and I put it out anyway, because that’s the discipline: the accountability of being heard before you’re ready is itself part of what makes you ready.
The 10,000 hours are invisible to everyone except the person putting them in. But they’re not invisible in the work. They show up, slowly, in the precision. In the capacity to borrow Edmund Sears’s scaffold from 1849 and make it bear the weight of 2026. In the ability to make a veteran remember his mother on a Tuesday.
Please don’t stop the music.
I don’t intend to.
Tags: daily protest songwriting practice, Nik Bear Brown Musinique, anti-war music 2026, 10000 hours deliberate creative practice, Strange Brothers Wilfred Owen
