Happy Old Year! First things first: This is the last email Noizeletter. I’ve given my oldest daughter Sidney, a Yale MBA with far more expertise than I have, carte blanche to modernize my music entrepreneur business model. She’s decreed I’m no longer sending email Noizeletters and moving me to Substack in 2026. Apparently, that’s where the cool smart kids are, and she sincerely wants me to be a cool smart kid, refusing to accept my explanation that in actuality I am a dinosaur.*
So, fittingly, my last email Noizeletter is about loss. And rebirth. I’ve been thinking about the holidays in a new way the past few years, with both the experience and understanding that holidays are actually hard for a lot of people for a lot of reasons. I lost my mom a few years ago after spending several years looking after her with Alzheimer’s, to the point I was only working part-time. I’m the last member of my childhood nuclear family — my brother and father were both long gone — and as I organized Mom’s memorial and sold my childhood home, I realized… with her loss, I also literally lost anyone at all to talk to firsthand about anything that happened in our family in that house for all those years. With the loss of the house, I lost any tactile or environmental reference to those years as well. I realized my memory of it all is hazy, getting hazier… and there is no remedy. None at all. It’s just a loss.
It was unexpectedly brutal. To be honest, I haven’t fully recovered or figured out how to deal with all of it. And I’m not sure I ever will. Most likely, I’ll always live with a sense of loss. Most likely, you feel this too. Especially at the holidays. Mom had legendary singing family Christmas parties. People in town still talk to me about them. Those parties are gone. The piano is no longer in that room. Learning how to live with failure is always more useful than learning how to live with success. I’m creating various works of art in various formats to explore all of the above and work through it. Always will be.
Loss, from my Soundtracks album, is one of my most personal pieces
And then I realized… I’ve written an entire piano sonata about this. I went back and listened to it after many years. Learned to play it again on piano. Very cathartic, in a way only music can be. The Loss Sonata was put together in memory of my father, and comes in three movements: Memories Fade, Loss, and Here’s To Life. Emotionally and intellectually, I am somewhere in between movements 2 and 3 right now. An internal struggle that I won’t fully win, but will live through, and colors my life experience.
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Thanks for your time. Share positive energy. Go make the world you live in.**
~ Cory Cullinan / Doctor Noize
*You will all get notifications of my new Substack whatever-it-is-they-call-it-over-there, and that is totally a term.
**And thank you for reading my email Noizeletter over the past few years.
Photo: Doctor Noize | From his website