265: Plot Twist: How to Find Your True Creative Path When Plans Fall Apart with Cole Cuchna

In this bite-sized episode of The Light Watkins Show, we revisit a pivotal moment in the life of Cole Cuchna, creator of the acclaimed podcast Dissect. Before Cole became known for breaking down albums track by track, he was a struggling musician sleeping on floors, living the band life, and questioning his path.

Cole shares the turning point that led him to walk away from the band and pursue formal music education—even though he couldn’t read musical notation at the time. His journey was far from easy. He navigated self-doubt, grueling coursework, and feeling like an outsider among formally trained musicians. But his persistence and love for analyzing music became his driving force.

Listeners will hear how Cole’s creative passion eventually aligned with his unique skills, leading him to launch Dissect, a groundbreaking podcast that explores the layers of iconic albums. From his deep dives into Beethoven and Shostakovich in college to his discovery of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, Cole reveals how every step, even the setbacks, contributed to finding his purpose.

This episode is packed with inspiration for anyone feeling stuck, questioning their path, or considering a bold career pivot. Cole’s story is a testament to how embracing discomfort and staying curious can lead to unexpected success. If you’ve ever wondered how to turn your unique passions into something meaningful, this episode is for you.

Tune in to learn how Cole’s journey can spark insights for your own life and leave you inspired to take the next step—no matter how uncertain it might feel.

Transcript

CC: “ One of my most vivid memories is bringing my daughter home from the hospital the first day. And Kendrick Lamar's album, To Pimp A Butterfly, came out the day we got home. Kendrick Lamar had released this fantastic album. So I put on headphones, I was listening to the album while holding my daughter while she slept. And it was like in the morning sunrise coming through the window, like a very picture-perfect moment. Hearing this album for the first time, holding my newborn daughter for the first time, and just having this really, really beautiful experience with the music and the emotions of your child being home. That experience stuck with me. The album stuck with me. And I kept listening to it. I just knew that there was a story that I didn't understand and I just became more and more curious about what he was saying. And that's when the kind of light bulb went in my head and was like, I wanna learn more about this album. What if I studied it in the way that I used to study music in college? And that would become the premise for what Dissect was, that initial idea of like what if I took this album as seriously as I used to take Beethoven or Shostakovich in college?”
 

[INTRODUCTION] 

Today I've got another bite-sized plot twist podcast episode for you, which is a shorter clip from a past episode where the guest shares the story of that pivotal moment in their life that directed them toward what ultimately became their path and their purpose. And sometimes that plot twist looks like getting fired from a job or losing a bunch of money.

Or in the case of today's guest, Cole Cuchna, he found himself sleeping on floors and living the struggling musician life when he realized he needed a different path. Cole decided to go back to school for music - even though he couldn't read musical notation at the time. That bold decision, combined with his discovery that he loved writing about and analyzing music more than performing it, led him to eventually create Dissect, a groundbreaking podcast that breaks down influential albums track by track.

Let's listen in…

CC: Yeah, I think so. We didn't tour a bunch, but we did these weekend trips, where we tried to book a few shows out of town and hit it Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or whatever the case may be.We went on one particular trip to San Diego. Yeah, all three of my band members just got fucking trashed afterward. Just wasted. We were sleeping on someone's floor, and I just remember being the only sober one there. I would drink occasionally, but I would never get belligerent or anything like that. I always just felt like a babysitter.

I was sleeping on the floor. We’ve probably eaten whatever shit fast food that night. I was just like, “Nope. This ain’t it.” I can’t handle a few, even a couple more years of this. That was definitely the moment I was just – I love those guys. Still love them and still talk to them and everything like that, but it was just like, with me working harder than everyone else, paired with the lifestyle of essentially making no money and living in closets and all these things that I look back and think like, oh, those are sacrifices that I was making to pursue this larger goal. It just became for me like, I got continually worried about relying on other people for my own success, which is a double-edged sword in terms of, like, you do need other people in pretty much anything that you do to be successful.

But when you're so reliant on them, in particular, being in a band or anything creative, it became — whereas, like, as business partners. Would these be my business partners? Like, no way in hell. That combined with me wanting to go back to school and keep getting better at music and studying music formally. I think I'd gotten married right around that time, too. It was a culmination of things that came like, yeah, the band thing is probably not for me anymore.

LW: You were also probably pretending with your parents like everything was fine, right? They go, “How are you doing, Cole?” “Oh, everything is great. We’re eating Taco Bell and sleeping on the floor and are making no money.” Everything they said was going to happen. It ended up happening.

CC: Yeah. Right. They were really supportive. They would come to my shows, everything like that. Ironically, I'd still look back at that band and think, yeah, if we would have kept going, we probably would have done something. The band was good. The blast show we played was the biggest show we had, and we played with a nationally touring act, which made it well. I wouldn't say it made it more difficult to leave. I was ready to leave no matter what. But it wasn't like, I was leaving nothing. I do feel we had the potential to do something, whether that was a sustaining career or not. I do believe we could have gone somewhere with it. But life happened, and I moved on.

[0:24:41] LW: You end up going to Cal State Sacramento but sounds like you were broke, so I don't know how you ended up paying for that. You said you faked your way into the music program. What exactly does that mean?

[0:24:52] CC: At that point, I'd played music for over, I'd say, almost 15 years-ish. But I was self-taught. I think I took one or two lessons when I was – part of me getting a guitar for my 13th birthday was it, I had to take lessons, and that lasted a couple of weeks, and I was like, I just wanted to be Jimi Hendrix and my guitar teacher was a flamenco guitar player. That's not what I'm doing here. I was a bit self-taught. I had seen notes. I know what music notes were, but I didn't know how to read them.

As I started to think about like, how am I going to progress as a musician, I felt like I had maxed out on my own self-knowledge. I knew some theory. I didn't really know how to read music. I couldn't sit down at a piano and just play a piece reading it. I was like, yeah, I need formal education. In preparation for thinking about going to college, I started to look at, “Oh, hey. How do I read music a little bit better?”

You have to audition to get into the composition program at most colleges. You have to audition, but as a composer, you can't really audition, so you audition as a performer first, and then you end up majoring in composition, but you also have to play an instrument. I played piano. I tried out — my audition was a piece that I wrote, which masked the fact that I didn't really know how to read music. I got into the program on a piece that I wrote and then realized very shortly after that I was just totally, totally out of my depth.

The experience of knowing how far I was behind because when you don't know, you don't know. You don't know what you don't know. There's this whole other world of, like, I realized all these musicians that I'm suddenly in school with, and classes with have been playing music formally since junior high when they started playing saxophone and then took lessons and was in a band through high school. I had just no experience whatsoever, with any of it. Yeah, me sneaking my way into the program, getting in, and realizing what the program actually was, was an entirely different thing that I can tell you some horror stories about. But that's how I got in was like playing a composition that I wrote myself that – so masked me, not knowing how to read music.

LW: There was no reading music 101 class because everyone should have already been reading music by the time you get there.

CC: The lowest music theory course was advanced — it’s an advanced course. It's not like, here's the note A, and here’s like – you know what I mean? It's like, it’s not that at all. I was starting at zero pretty much, and everyone else was at 1.7 or whatever.

LW: Let me ask you this. If you don't know how to play music by ear, let's say, like I don't know how to play. I can't read music. I’ve never really played an instrument seriously. Would you and I be at the same level? Or the fact that you could actually play instruments, would you find that a little bit less challenging to go to a music school where everyone already knows everything?

CC: Yeah. I mean, I was a good piano player, and I was a good guitar player, and you learn – I mean, it's like – it's not like I was totally naïve like I didn't know what chords were, or some music theory. You know what I mean? You could just pick that up by learning other people's songs and be like, “Oh, I see why this works, and I see why this –” You know what I mean? I did know some things. I don't want to be totally like I was just like –

LW: Yeah, of course.

CC: In terms of, like, that's way different than formal training, where you're learning physical techniques, not only how to play your instrument, but also sight reading. That was the biggest hindrance for me; it was just seeing the notes that are on the page and then playing them on the piano was, it was like being where everyone else was fluent in a language; I was not fluent in a language. Or I was looking at the dictionary to find the word for whatever Spanish word you're trying to say; that was me. Looking at the note on the page and then finding on my keyboard was just not – there's a huge disconnect there.

LW: Yeah, I was just thinking that because I'm learning Spanish right now, and I'm translating three times in my head. I hear it, I translate it to English, and then I think about the Spanish response. Then I have to translate it from English to Spanish response and then speak it all within half a second. It's like, you just, “Aah.”

CC: Yeah, exactly. That was exactly me at the piano trying to read music.

LW: What was the tuition situation?

CC: I took out student loans. Pretty much that, and then me and my wife moved in with her mom. My wife went to nursing school while I was going to music school, so we didn't have rent to pay, which was a huge blessing. I didn't have to work for the majority of the time I was in college.

LW: Still humbling, though, right? Moving into your wife's mom's place in your 20s.

CC: Definitely. I was pretty determined that what I was doing was the right decision. I didn't feel like I made a mistake

LW: Was this feeling you're describing now? It sounds like, you knew that this was your path. Was that the first time you felt that in your life, or had you felt that before and it was like a familiarity when you felt it again, and that made you work harder and take those extra classes to learn how to read music and stuff like that?

CC: Yeah. I think everything that I've ever decided to do felt like the right thing in the moment. I tried to execute that thing as if that were the truth. You know what I mean? When I was in a band, that felt right and that's why I pursued it at that time. I think, as everyone knows, as you get older, just life evolves, things change and motives change and all that, and you have to be adaptive while still staying true to that feeling. The feeling that I was getting with the band was like, this is not right for me now.

The feeling that I got with, in theory, pursuing music formally was feeling like that's what I wanted to do, and it felt right when I did, even though it was extremely challenging and I almost dropped out because of all the factors of me being so underdeveloped. Still, I didn't drop out. It still felt like this is what I need to be doing. Once I committed to that, it was like, I'm going to do everything that I can to be successful

You alluded to the way that I was able to make up my education that I was lacking was I would take the 18 units required as a music major. Then on the side, I found these, what are called the great courses, which they still have them, but they're essentially college-level courses that you could take. You didn’t get credits for them or anything, but they are college-level courses taught by renowned professors from across the country. I found this really great professor, Dr. Greenberg, who had all these courses on music. I bootlegged all of the courses, downloaded them, and just took all the courses that were offered.

It was all for non-musicians. A lot of them were non-musicians, so it was the perfect level for me because all the theory stuff was explained in a way that my mom could understand. It was meant to be accessible to non-musicians. For my position, it was great because it wasn't technical, and the technical parts were explained in a way that everyone could understand. I was taking all those courses on the side while I was taking the actual courses at college. I did that for about two years. By the second or third year, I felt comparable.

I wasn't excelling as a musician. I started to excel at the education part of it. I started to excel at essay writing about music, and I started to excel at some of the theoretical stuff. I never became what I would feel comfortable comparing myself to the pianist that I was playing alongside during college. Those people were on a whole other level, musicianship-wise in terms of playing their instrument. I never got to that level. But I really started to excel in the more academic part of music, which would eventually lead me to do Dissect.

LW: This is also the first time you were dissecting songs and getting context based on people's personal lives and the time they wrote this piece, and the place where they played the piece. You do a great job of breaking all this down in your TED Talk. But for the listener who hasn't seen your TED Talk, can you just give us an idea of what that would look like in a typical song, or a Beethoven song, or something that you guys would study?

CC: Yeah. You would just, like any class of any subject; you have these open prompts of writing essays and music. It could be a Beethoven piece. I remember I wrote a piece on Dimitri Shostakovich, one of my favorite composers. Yeah, if you wrote a piece about whatever, pick a piece, you'd have to research. You can analyze just the music, but what I discovered through college was like, you would learn so much about the music by learning about the composer and the time that the composer was living in, what was happening during that time, where they were living, the things that were going on in their environment, personal life. Researching all that ended up paying dividends in the analysis of the composition, and you can really give the context of a piece through the context of the artist's life and the time they're living.

I really started to love that process. I was always the person that began the essay the moment that they were assigned it. I wasn't procrastinating, like I realized a lot of the people I was going to school with would procrastinate, and I'd be halfway down with mine, and they hadn't even started. I remember thinking back and being like, or just realizing in the moment that I was a little bit unique in that way, and I'm really doing this thing that other people didn't seem to love so much.

I thought it made me a better musician than a better composer because I learned how to incorporate things larger than myself into the compositions by studying how other composers did that. Yeah, I also learned how art could be a reflection of culture and society, where it's like, you can learn something about more than the composition through the composition. You can learn about Dmitri Shostakovich, who was composing under Stalin's rule. I learned so much about USSR, Russia, and all that through the compositions of Shostakovich because he was living during that time and he was having interactions with Stalin and all this stuff.

I just really loved how the composition can be a wormhole into history, and what you can learn about society, history, but also just what it means to be human. I mean, that's really the underlying foundation of all art is translating human experience into something creative. What I'm always trying to get at, what I learn to get at was like, what are the human truths in this great piece of art, which is one reason why art stands the test of time, I believe, is that because they have the truth in them.

I really just got addicted to that uncovering process because I just felt like I was learning so much just personally about myself through these artworks that were composed 200 years ago. It was like, that's weird. But then it was like, why? Well, we're human, and we're all human. It's just sharing different human experiences that have these underlying universal principles to them. I just really loved that about analyzing music.

LW: I heard the movie producer, Brian Grazer. I think Ari Emanuel, the head of WME, talked about this, too, about how they had dyslexia. Obviously, no kid wants to be trying to read with dyslexia because you can't read, so they had to come up with workarounds, which helped them become, basically, hustlers. Like, learn how to make things happen through association, or through networking, or whatever, which then serve them really well in their careers. I used to teach yoga, and I joke that I was the stiffest yoga teacher — I could barely touch my toes. But it turned out to be a unique advantage because it allowed me to really hone in on articulation and not rely on demonstration. I'm wondering, in your case, not being able to read music initially and then having to go and study extra, looking back now, was that in some way a unique advantage for you as well?

CC: Yeah, I think so. Maybe at the time, it didn't feel like that.

LW: No, of course not.

CC: Yeah, just because insecurities and stress and all that.

LW: You were also older, too. You mentioned that you would be excited about these essays. I'm sure that kids who were 19 and 20 were like, “Yeah, whatever. I got to go party first.” But you were very focused. You were married. You're serious.

CC: That was definitely part of me, working hard. I felt like I did outwork most people. But yeah, I think that had to do with me being older, and putting myself on the line to do this definitely forced me. Yeah, it's an interesting question in terms of your deficiencies being an advantage. I definitely think that they can. I think in my experience, yeah, I'm just trying to think of it exactly how that manifested itself because I do think it played a part. It might just be me overcompensating. That could be one component of it.

I'm deficient in these things, so I'm going to overcome – in the things that I can thrive in, I'm going to really thrive in, which I think was a big part of it. Because I wasn't thriving so much in the musician – the actual playing of the instruments. I was just at too many years of a disadvantage there, where it felt almost hopeless to try to catch up in that way. Yeah, I think part of me really excelling in the academic side of things was, yeah, that was an area that I felt my deficiencies weren't a problem. I loved it. I genuinely fell in love with it. I do think that definitely had some motivation there.

I mean, generally, when we find success in something, it feels good, right? We're naturally incentivized to keep pursuing it, and definitely think that was part of me excelling in the academic portion for sure.

LW: But those essays, you would get high marks on, even though you're playing catch up in the rest of the curriculum.

CC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The teachers would make it a point to be like, “This is really good.” I had a few of those where they took the time to be like, “You're doing above and beyond the–”

LW: Exceptional.

CC: Yeah, yeah. Even before, when I was not going to music, the first time I went to college, that was always the case, too, with different subjects and stuff. The essay writing was always something that I ended up just excelling at for whatever reason. My professors always noted that you're pretty good at this.

LW: Okay, so you graduate in 2015. Going to go be a maestro somewhere, or what was the plan, man? You just work your ass off getting this music degree and you end up at a coffee shop.

CC: Yeah. That’s, yeah, exactly what happened. It was a debate between continuing school, which was a master's, and a Ph.D. was really the only track as a music major. If you're not playing in – you're not an active player, and even there, it's really tough. I was not good enough at my instrument to be a professional player. Now it's getting pretty good at composing. What we didn't talk about so much was that I was a composition major, so I was writing pieces. I was learning how to write pieces for orchestra, for different ensembles, and was really, really like that, although I wasn't as good as I was at essay writing. The academic stuff was always the strongest. After I graduated, it was done — I want to go back to school for probably six more years, maybe five. At that point, I was what? 28 or however old I was. It's somewhat daunting to commit –

LW: How about getting the band back together? I mean, you're a better songwriter now, right? You studied composition.

CC: Yeah. That could have been an option. Even to this day, I'm not interested at all in that. It's hard. I mean, I did that for – I started my first band I was in high school, and then I was have ever since. I'd done that for over 10 years at that point. I maxed myself out, I think. Relying on other people is always scary, to be honest. Going back to that was scary because yeah, it was debate. I got a job at a coffee shop to just buy time, to be honest but then ended up falling in love with coffee. That sent me on a whole other wormhole of education and experience.

LW: Is it nepotism? You saw an ad on Craigslist. How did you get this job at a coffee shop?

CC: Well, I fell in love with coffee in college. I'd go to coffee shops to write or do whatever and really fell in love with coffee as a consumer and really geeked out on, at that point, what I could in terms of self-education. I was buying beans and studying the flavors, and then I started reading about the history of coffee. Anything that I like, I ended up just obsessing on for a while. Then I was like, “Oh, I'll just get a job at this coffee shop that I've been going to, that I really respected and was doing really well locally.”

LW: I’ve been to Temple before.

CC: Oh, cool.

LW: Yeah. My dad lives in Sacramento.

CC: Oh, cool.

LW: I would go visit. I’ve visited him a few times and looking for a place to write or whatever. I found myself in Temple one day.

CC: Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah. I worked for them for five years. I ended up just not going back to college. It just felt too daunting at that point.

LW: It sounds like you had a pretty decent job there, and you're doing all these interesting things, teaching coffee classes, etc. But in the back of your mind, did it feel like you were settling, or did you feel like you were just incubating until the next thing presented itself that felt the same way going to – music school felt?

CC: I genuinely fell in love with coffee, and I resigned myself to thinking that it could be a career path that I would be satisfied with. At that time, it felt like that. I think looking back, it probably would have run its course. I think I would have probably maxed out with that if I did it too long. When I got out of college, I had a job at a coffee shop, and then I was making music still. I released, self-released an album that I did all my own. Produced, mixed, mastered. Everything from start to finish was me.

It was electronic music combined with classical music was the idea. I was trying to fuse those two elements together. Not dance electronic, but more like ambient electronic, with some hip-hop influence, drums, and stuff. That was mostly me. I wasn't trying to make it. I never played a show, but it was just my creative outlet at the time and that kind of ended. I was still making music, but I was doing it less. I just had a kid. I was about to have a kid. There definitely was a feeling that something was missing. That I always had creative opportunities with the job that I had, but they were limited. I wasn't making music as much, and that, yeah, definitely, there's a little bit of time there where it felt like, yeah, something was missing. I really missed writing is what I came to miss about college. The most, actually, was that I missed writing essays. If you want to get into Dissect, that's where it started.

LW: You also came across the Serial Podcast. That was the first episodic podcast a lot – myself included. A lot of us came across, and it got us creative types thinking about, “Hmm. Maybe I could do something like this.”

LW: I mean, that first season of Serial is a landmark in podcast history, to say the least. Probably the most important podcast season ever at this point, I think. Because it was a watershed moment for the format, and a lot of people discovered podcasts through that season of Serial. It was really well done. The limitations of audio storytelling, or the perceived limitations of storytelling through audio, I think, they broke a lot of ground there and really proved that you can create captivating, serialized long-form content with just audio. It was super compelling, just as compelling as watching a TV show.

Just like a lot of people, I fell in love not only with that show but also the possibilities of the format and me, anything that I take a liking to, I'm always like, “What if I did that? What would my version of that be?” I just can't help myself, anything that I end up liking creatively, like I can't help us start to formulate what my version of that thing be.

LW: You had a problem. You didn't like the sound of your voice.

CC: Oh, yeah. Still don't. I mean, I didn’t.

LW: How were you going to navigate that with a podcast?

CC: I mean, that was definitely one of the initial mental hurdles. I think anyone that's tried podcasts, it's a big mind fuck. Having to hear your voice over and over. Anyone that doesn't do it often will hear their voice on video, or whatever, and be like, “That's what I sound like?” Everyone has that experience. Imagine cutting hours of audio to make a show. It's like an existential crisis.

LW: Word on the street is you didn't think about it very much. You just started putting it together. I guess you wrote your first episode and went into your closet, recorded it. Is that how it went down?

CC: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, the story I always tell is, I think, it's important because you just never know how things come together in a way that you just would never predict because Dissect ends up representing everything that I've ever done in my life into one thing. If you told me five years before I started the podcast like, you would be a successful podcaster one day. I'd probably say, “What's podcasting, for one?” Even if I knew what podcasting was, I’d be like, how is that ever possible? I can't even imagine what that looks like.

A couple of things all happened at once. To try to briefly explain, the biggest thing was I was having my first child. That obviously changes your life more than anything. But I just remember one of, like I said, I have a terrible memory, but one of my most vivid memories is bringing my daughter home from the hospital on the first day and Kendrick Lamar's album, To Pimp a Butterfly coming out the day after, the day we got home from the hospital. Kendrick Lamar released this; what I was hearing was this fantastic album.

I put on headphones, was listening to the album while holding my daughter in her nursery, while she slept. It was in the morning, super early, obviously, in the morning, because the sleeping hours weren’t regulated at that point. It was like, sunrise coming through the window, a very picture-perfect moment. Hearing this album for the first time, holding my newborn daughter in my arms for the first time, or at the house, essentially, and just having this really, really beautiful experience with the music and the emotions of your child being home. That experience stuck with me. The album stuck with me. I kept listening to it, and I was like, this is just fantastic. It is incredible music.

Then also, I just knew that there was stuff being talked about. There was a story that I didn't understand. There are certain lines, or issues, or concepts that I’m like, “What is that? What is he talking about there?” I just kept listening to it, and I just became more and more curious about what he was saying. That's when the light bulb went in my head. I was like, “I want to learn more about this album. What if I studied it in the way that I used to study music in college?” That was the premise for what became Dissect was that initial idea of, like, what if I took this album as seriously as I used to take Beethoven, or Shostakovich in college?” 

[END]

If you'd like to hear how the rest of Cole's story unfolds, including how Dissect grew from a closet recording to a cultural phenomenon, head over to Episode 161 and start at around the 50-minute mark. And be sure to follow Cole on Instagram @dissectpodcast for more deep dives into groundbreaking albums.

And if you enjoyed this conversation, check out Episode 18 with Ava DuVernay, who transformed from a publicist to an award-winning filmmaker changing the face of Hollywood. Also try Episode 123 with Adam Roa, who went from struggling actor to viral spoken word poet after a single performance changed everything, launching him into a career of inspiring others through poetry and creative expression.
 
 And if you know of someone else who's had an incredible plot twist in their life, and they're making the world a better place, please send me your guest suggestions. My email is light@lightwatkins.com.

Please take a few seconds to rate and review the show and I'll see you on Wednesday with the next long form conversation about an ordinary person who's out there in the world doing extraordinary things to leave the world a better place

And until then, keep trusting your intuition. Keep following your heart. Keep taking those leaps of faith. And if no one's told you recently that they believe in you, I believe in you. Thank you and have a fantastic day!