The Last Email Noizeletter

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.

The Loss Sonata was actually adapted from a film score I was hired to write years ago for the great documentary filmmaker Kristen Nutile’s brilliant film, Loss — a personal recounting of her father’s death when she was in her teens. It’s the most personally affecting soundtrack I’ve ever written. My father also died in my teens, and he looked strikingly similar to the subject of this film. As I watched and composed for weeks, in many ways I felt I was writing this music for my own father and experience. Honestly, by the end of the process I felt pretty screwed up emotionally, full of anxiety from reliving something I probably had not fully processed, and I haven’t done a film score since.

But man… this solo piano sonata expresses all of that. And it helped me through the next similar round decades later, allowing me to feel the same things while giving me the musical support and catharsis to not fall as deep into the trauma. I performed Lossin a series of Cory Cullinan & Riley Max concerts we played the summer after Mom/Grandma died. The house would go silent. People related. We connected through music without lyrics.

The final movement of the sonata, Here’s To Life, is one of the most joyously exuberant things I’ve ever written — and they are indeed written to mourn and celebrate the same thing. I’ve learned over the years this is the best way to handle failure.

So this final email Noizeletter — for now, and maybe forever — is dedicated to all of you who feel like you should be nothing but happy over the holidays. You shouldn’t. You can actually have more mixed, even melancholy, feelings about them. That’s life. You are not alone. I feel it too. I hope Loss and Here’s To Life — with all their hard-wrought isolation, loneliness, beauty and rebirth — are cathartic for you as well.

Here’s To Life, linked above, is the final movement of the Loss Sonata.

Rebirth

So I’d like to close this year, and the email iteration of this Noizeletter, with a story of rebirth that was only possible because of the loss of my mother and our house detailed above. It’s one of my favorite stories of the year, and received some incredibly emotional responses from people all over when I posted it on social media earlier this year. Here it is:

A few years ago, my childhood home in California was bought by a man and his family from a country that is in the news a lot now — Iran — and for difficult things. An immigrant family liven the American Dream. I sold him our house but never met him or even knew who he was — my real estate agent handled all that, as is the norm.

Last summer, when I taught at Stanford, our daily took a walk in my old neighborhood. A nostalgic but also bittersweet journey. I still know many of our wonderful neighbors there. But I didn’t know who lived in my family’s home of 49 years. We were walking the neighborhood, and a man drove up into our old driveway. He got out of the car and took the garbage out. As he did, he noticed this family — our family — briefly watching him. We looked different than him, and we were strangers. And he said hello.

I told him: “Hello. You don’t know me, but I sold you this house. I hope you have a wonderful life there.” To our surprise, he immediately and graciously invited us inside to meet his family, have a nostalgic moment, and see the changes they’d made in the home and yard. I immediately thought: ‘That is not something most Americans I know would do.’ But this man did it, generously, without hesitation. He invited strangers into his home to meet his young child.

We met his brilliant wife, who’s from another country in the news a lot now for challenging reasons: Ukraine. Their delightful child. They told us a bit about their history, their dreams, why they had chosen our city and our home. We actually had many things in common. They had updated my childhood home inside from the 1970s look my parents had built (we bought it in 1972), but those updates were far from complete, and they had a years-long plan to update it as finances allowed. I told him this was exactly the long journey my wife and I had taken with our Colorado home, our first home with a yard, budgeting and building the back yard and recording studio and things to complete our dream home over decades as we could afford it.

I am grateful to this man for giving me one last wonderful family experience in the home I grew up in, and even more grateful to him for trusting us enough to give us a glimpse into *his* family life they are building there. I’m getting a little misty-eyed about it just reliving it writing this, in hopes of etching it into my memory forever. I told him I am very happy — and that my mother would be very happy — that a nice young family living the American Dream is building a new life there. In essence, that the home is doing the same for others as it did for us. I have actually run into this man and said hi to him at the nearby Safeway since then when I was in town. I know his name; but more importantly, I know that he is kind of spirit and building new dreams and adventures in the home where my brother and I did the same.

There is a lesson there, for all of us, right now. I’m not sure what it is, and I’m not sure how to right it, but it’s there for us.

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.