Music is a Superpower
It speaks to the spirit first, then the heart, then the mind (An excerpt from the testimony of Nehemiah Williams)
Every Thursday we’ll release a new episode of “From Work To Worship”, where we explore how people’s calling becomes their calling card, how vocation fuels occupation, and how “to work” can be “to worship” when we understand who we were made for. Episode 3 is friend, musician, and business partner, Nehemiah Williams, the other side of PPDK Productions.
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Here is some of our interview with Nehemiah Williams.
Nehemiah
I was looking for a career path, like a vehicle to that life, what was going to make it come.
Nathanael
And the word career comes from vehicle. Like the etymology of the word career literally means a vehicle.
Nehemiah
And I was driving a vehicle.
No. Um, so. Yeah, I was searching for that. So in a couple months after that first revelation, God spoke to me again, and he basically just suggested, Hey, what if you just gave everything to music? Would you just put, go, went all in with it? Um, and I was like, because I knew that this was the Lord speaking, that's a whole other conversation, but because I knew it, I was like, okay, God challenge accepted. That's how I received it as a challenge. So I was in Independence, Missouri, and I went to the nearest guitar center. I parked the truck, went to the guitar center. I bought musical instruments, amps, everything I needed to just play music. And so while I was driving the truck, I would just sing all day long.
And when I stopped the truck at the end of the day, I would just play music until I went to sleep. Woke up, repeated the process, and immediately I could feel in my emotions and in my spirit that, oh, all of the meaning in life is routed through music for me. There's no access to any kind of a meaningful life except through music.
And as I look back on my life, It only became more true because Music has been something that has stood out for me since I was literally a baby. I remember my mother telling me about the only thing that would shut me up when I was bawling as a baby was just turning on music. I was an easy child because she just needed to turn on the music and I would shut up, you know.
Nathanael
That podcast you sent me where the guy said, like, he sees angels. He said, the angels can't make new music. They can only sing what's already out there. So when people, humans make music, they're flocking to them because they're like, Oh, this is so beautiful. We can only sing what's already made. Right. So they want us. They're like, make some music.
Nehemiah
Interesting. Brings a whole new meaning to the term worship leader. But um, That being said, I started to understand that this is the meaning of my life. It's music. Deeply connected. So I'm going in this direction. There's no other career path. It's music. I have to figure out how to do music. So knowing that and fully accepting that, I need to understand what music was.
Why is music this significant thing? Why is it a universal language? Why do people, what influence does it have? You know? And so I started to write down every definition of music that I heard. Because music is actually really hard to define. What is music? Everybody's going to give you a different answer.
One thing that I, one definition that I really liked, is that music by nature is the sound of spirit, of the spirituality, of the spirit realm. You know what I'm saying? It's like, music by nature is spiritual. Which is why it has such a profound effect on your emotions. Because it gets underneath your emotion.
It's also why if you want to, like, if you want people to sing a melody, all you do is have to sing it around them. And then they'll just start singing it naturally. You know, especially if they know the song and they like it too. It resonates with them. So they start singing it too. It's called an earworm.
What I learned is that if you want to implant a message or a seed, an idea in somebody's mind, just add some music to it. It's part of the reason why if you put a melody to any fact, you need to memorize it. You immediately memorize it way faster than you ever would have by repeating it over and over again, or whatever technique of memorization, just make music out of it.
Nathanael
The jingles are propaganda, which comes from propagate, to propagate an idea.
Nehemiah
And so one of the super powers of music is I can put anything inside your soul. If I just add good music to it, music that resonates with you, I can put any message in your soul. Because music doesn't speak to the mind. It doesn't speak to the heart alone.
It speaks to the spirit first before everything else. Which is why it resonates with your whole being. It's why whenever music is playing, you, you know, you, you attach notes to, to like, track people's brain signature or the colors, you know, what parts of their brains are being lit, lit up the whole thing.
It lights up your whole mind because music is so deeply spiritual that it resonates with people's whole being right away.
Nathanael
You can actually trigger people with Alzheimer's. To retrieve memories through music. So you literally put their long term memory back online by tying it to music. And so it's in our deepest recesses of our memory and the storytelling.
Nehemiah
And that's why movies are set to music. Music, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's why, literally, music almost controls time, as it, as it relates to you, because time is relative, right? Music literally controls time as it relates, as it is relative to you, because if you play a 20 second clip, no music. That 20 seconds is a long freaking time to you, but you put some music to it.
It doesn't even matter what it is. It takes 20 seconds and it literally minimizes it by probably 30, 40%. It seems like 12 seconds now because of the music, it just goes by. You're just so raptured in the scene with the music that it literally minimizes time. It shrinks time. Like. I saw Wicked the other day.
Wicked is a three hour, dang near a three hour movie. That movie went by in an instant because it's, there's music, there's songs all throughout. And this is true with almost every movie because every movie has like a backtracking and a soundtrack and everything.
Nathanael
It's almost like you can layer experience in all five levels with a song. Trigger it to package. Yeah, you can, it's like, oh my God. It's like, you simplify a moment. It's a compressed zip file of, of five layers, five different, compressed files, audio, visual, everything. It's compressed into a song, a three minute clip, send it to you. You watch it, you listen to it, bam, it unzips everything and you experience that moment in all real time.
Yeah. I wrote that Christmas song with my uncle. I don't, we collaborate on it. We sort of have ideas, but it's got many, many different stories layered on top of each other, set to music. I did not know that I was inserting my story, the prodigal son, Tom's story, other people's stories. It just, Float out of it and then you share that with someone they go, Oh, this, this is like my life.
And it's so many, things just layered on top of each other. Yeah. I saw a movie it's being produced by exactly produced by Jo Koy and produced and written by Ariana Basco and the people from palms up academy and recess mic and it's brilliant. But it took an entire open mic set and all the songs and pieces from them and it layered them onto one person's story. And so each performer is like entering into the story of this person's life and playing different characters using their storytelling and their pieces on top of it And it's exactly what it feels like when you're listening to different people's things because you insert your story onto there you map it onto theirs. It was, it was remarkable.
Nehemiah
Yeah, so music is a superpower. I'm convinced it's a superpower. Um, you can control culture with it, which is why the enemy loves music. Like people talk about, people talk about, you know, Satan's original mission and how deeply musical it was, and how Satan used music to corrupt a third of the angels.
Then they became fallen along with him. Um, you know, it was music that he used to warp them, to warp those spiritual beings and turn them into his puppets, you know. And so, this is the power of music. But, there's a lot of music in the world. There's a lot of music in the world. And so all that being said, I started to understand the significance of my gifting and I started to see it from a different perspective.
You can listen to the full episode of part 3 here:
Music by nature is spiritual
This is part 3 of the testimony of friend, musician, and business partner, Nehemiah Williams.
Get tickets to our next show and see Nehemiah perform his testimony through song, Nathanael perform through comedy, and them together through verse and poetry. We might even see Nehemiah perform an original song on the piano. Stay tuned.