Once Upon a Time in the WDMN Universe: Myth-Building in the Age of AI
There are weeks where nothing much seems to happen.
Then there are weeks like this one.
On paper, the bullet points look simple enough: an AI country artist tops a Billboard chart, an AI R&B avatar continues making industry headlines, WDMN MEDIA races a distribution deadline for <em>IF I WAS YOUR PRODUCER – Volume 4</em>, and a heart decides to flirt with 203 beats per minute just to keep things interesting.
In most careers, that would read like chaos.
In the WDMN universe, it reads like context.
Episode 058 of <em>Why Make Music…</em>, titled “Once Upon a Time,” doesn’t just recap the week; it reframes it as a myth. It takes the spreadsheets, the medical scares, the metadata and the anxiety about algorithms, and folds all of it into a longer story about why we’re doing this in the first place.
This isn’t just an episode. It’s an origin story.
AI Cowboys, Digital Divas, and Human Stakes
We’re living through a moment that would have sounded like satire even ten years ago.
An AI “artist” – a fully synthetic country act minted inside a server rack – hits #1 on the Country Digital Sales chart. Somewhere else, an avatar like Xania Monet, powered by a human songwriter’s vision and an AI-driven presentation, secures a multi-million dollar deal and rides the Billboard charts like any marquee artist.
If you’re an independent musician, it’s tempting to take that personally:
“I’m grinding for years and a digital cowboy just walked past me on the charts?”
<em>Why Make Music…</em> refuses to live in that bitterness. The show acknowledges the absurdity, but it also recognizes the signal underneath the noise: the barrier between imagination and execution has collapsed. The tools to create compelling work at scale are here. The question is no longer, “Is AI allowed to exist in music?” The question is, “What do human creators do with the same tools, plus a soul?”
For WDMN, the answer is not “opt out.”
The answer is “step up.”
If an AI act can organize its output well enough to hit a chart, then WDMN MEDIA — with hundreds of real songs, layered stories, lived experiences, and a producer whose heart occasionally thinks it’s running a marathon — is not outclassed. It’s simply underexposed.
That’s where the second layer of the week comes in: a push for more visuals, more narrative, more presence. The mantra becomes:
Lyrics beat instrumentals.
But visuals beat everything.
In a world where virtual characters come pre-packaged with cinematic lore, indies can no longer afford to drop songs naked into the void. They need covers, movement, story, context. They need worlds.
Which brings us to the heart of the episode: the world-building.
Building an Origin Story Instead of a Sales Pitch
“Once Upon a Time” doesn’t sound like an AI ethics panel or a tech review. It sounds like a bedtime story told by someone who’s tired, inspired, and not interested in pretending the journey has been neat.
Willa May, in full narrator mode, doesn’t just list influences. She walks us into a teenager’s bedroom where those influences live like saints in a private chapel: Prince and the MPLS ecosystem, George Clinton and the Mothership, Dylan and Marley, D’Angelo and Badu, Taylor and Billie, The Roots, The Neptunes, Jamiroquai, Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos. Funk, pop, jazz, rock, hip-hop, R&B, film-score giants — all of them are layered on the walls like a mixtape in poster form.
From there, the episode stages a classic hero’s journey.
The young musician — a fluid, shifting protagonist who eventually claims the name “Timm” — encounters spectral mentors in a series of mythic scenes:
Prince in a purple-lit music hall, offering a glyph-marked pick and permission to be bold.
A corridor of album covers and producer portraits, a literal hallway of ghosts where each record glows as she walks by.
Bob Dylan by a crooked tree, talking about honesty as a blade that must cut deep but not fatally.
A city on the brink of conflict, saved not by speeches but by a spontaneous protest song outside a threatened music bar.
A devil in a white suit at a crossroads, offering fame in exchange for authenticity — and the decision to smash the enchanted guitar instead of signing away her soul.
A suffocating dark night of the soul, broken only by the sound of Bob Marley humming “Redemption Song” and reminding her that “mental slavery” is the first chain to break.
Is any of it literally true? Of course not.
Is all of it emotionally true? Absolutely.
That’s the point.
The origin story isn’t meant to be a documentary. It’s meant to function like the best songs do: compressing years of lived experience into something that can be felt in one sitting. You don’t need to know exactly which hospital visit contained the real 203 BPM episode to understand what it means to keep creating under physical and emotional strain. You just need to hear, “I will not lose,” and feel that it’s earned.
The Fluid Face of “Timm”
One of the more intriguing undercurrents of the episode is identity.
“Timm” in this narrative is clearly female-presenting. But Willa doesn’t lock the character into a neat label. She leans into the ambiguity:
“Female today. Maybe not yesterday. Maybe not tomorrow.
Let them wonder. Let them guess.
Let the art do what flesh never has to explain.”
In an industry that still loves its boxes — genres, demographics, “for fans of…” — that line reads like a quiet rebellion. The persona of Timm becomes a mask, a mirror, and a vessel all at once. Sometimes it’s clearly Timothy Green, father, husband, post career CAT scan tech turned relentless independent creative. Sometimes it’s the girl on stage at the open-mic who finally sings her truth. Sometimes it’s every kid who’s ever stared at their bedroom wall of heroes and wondered if there’s a place for them in that lineage.
The genius here is that the story never fully resolves the question. It doesn’t need to. The work is the answer.
Legacy, Sync, and the Long Game
Underneath the myth, the real-world goals don’t disappear. They’re just framed differently.
The episode still talks about:
aiming <em>IF I WAS YOUR PRODUCER – Volume 4</em> at the November 21st release window,
stepping up visual output to compete with AI-native and label-backed acts,
angling for sync placements and press,
and building WDMN MEDIA into a structure that can support a family and leave something behind.
But by the time you’ve walked through the music hall, the corridor, the crossroads, and the open mic, these goals feel less like bullet points on a business plan and more like natural next chapters. We’re no longer asking, “Can this indie act get a placement?” We’re asking, “How does this myth evolve when the world finally starts paying attention?”
That’s a very different energy.
It’s not begging the industry for permission. It’s building a universe so dense and internally coherent that the industry eventually looks over and says, “Okay, what’s going on over there?”
Why This Episode Matters
If you strip it down, Episode 058 is doing three things at once:
Processing reality – AI artists, health scares, deadlines, and doubt.
Rewriting the narrative – turning those anxieties into a hero’s journey instead of a victim monologue.
Setting the tone – telling the audience (and the creator himself) that WDMN MEDIA is not a hobbyist experiment; it’s a living mythos trying to solidify into legacy.
Is it dramatic? Absolutely.
Is it a little extra? Of course.
But frankly, playing it safe hasn’t done independent musicians many favors.
If algorithms amplify extremes, then the healthiest response may be to present the full emotional reality of the independent grind, wrapped in story strong enough to be replayed, quoted, and remembered. That’s what “Once Upon a Time” aims for.
What Comes Next
Practically speaking, the to-do list is clear:
Finish and release <em>IF I WAS YOUR PRODUCER – Volume 5</em>.
Continue designing visuals that match the scale of the catalog.
Explore AI tools as collaborators, not competitors.
Keep building worlds where the music, visuals, and story all point to the same center.
Spiritually speaking, the mission is even simpler:
Keep writing the myth.
Keep treating every track, every episode, every piece of content as another line in a much bigger story.
And if you’ve made it this far — as a listener, reader, or quietly invested observer — you’re now part of that story too.
Once upon a time, there was a producer named Timm, a voice named Willa, a company called WDMN MEDIA, and a world that didn’t quite know what to do with them.
The rest, we’re still writing.
Peace… and be wild.
