This is Tom Jensen speaking directly — no filters, no polish. Sections 29, 30, and 31 were recorded on a series of drives between Massachusetts and Maine, and this one — 29/35 — comes from a single trip to Maine and back. These are not polished essays or heavily edited writing. They are raw, unscripted car talks that Tom recorded and shared as-is, because they add a lot. Transcribed by AI and lightly cleaned up, this section is the author's unscripted final word on his life, his work, and why any of it matters. It's part business pitch, part memoir, part philosophy, and part mission statement. He explains why giving away his lyrics for free is actually a smarter move than selling them, traces the personal journey that shaped 30 years of writing, and lays out his vision for a music industry that pays the people who actually do the work. It closes with a formal statement of intent, a sign-off to the reader, and one last unfiltered thought on politics and the state of the world.
Note: Section 30/35 comes from another Massachusetts–Maine drive, and 31/35 from another. Same format, same unscripted honesty.
These are three separate recordings made during a single drive from Massachusetts to Maine and back — raw, unscripted car talk recorded and shared as-is. Not polished writing, not heavily edited. But they add a lot. Transcribed by AI and lightly cleaned up.
Hello. We are talking about the Collaborhythm Collabtunes project, and I am giving some analogies for ways to describe how my venture works as far as the free lyrics is concerned. The music business, all the big powers that be, they make their money — or what happens is, it's exclusive ownership that makes the catalogs so valuable. The Michael Jacksons, the Beatles, it's hundreds of millions of dollars because when ownership is centered in one entity, it allows great wealth to be made off of it, essentially. In order to sell all the rights, ownership needs to be streamlined or split up or everyone has to agree on everything. As soon as something is privatized, its value goes up — but then it's set up so that there's six or seven groups of people who take all the money before the artists get it. In essence, the artists get pennies on the dollar. That's the system that's working right now, that's in place.
So one way that I can stop that and make the music catalog — or at least some section, some part of the song — if I can make it so it can't belong to anybody, then it essentially kills the entire value of the song to the big conglomerates because they can't fucking sell it. What that means is that who has the value? Well, my lyrics are given away for free, so I'm not getting any value from that. But what happens is, when somebody builds upon my words and they add anything, then whatever they add, that's exclusively their value. And if anybody builds on that, then the people down the — what is essentially a blockchain — they get the credit. So I start the blockchain with my writing. That breaks the chain of corporate ownership, so that allows everything to be brought up to the next guy.
My lyrics are the raw materials. It's the wood. My lyrics are the trees. Everybody gets the trees as the raw material, and then they come and add their value to whittle down the trees and make two-by-fours and sell it up the chain to make it more profitable. As soon as somebody takes my words and adds something to it, something that has no value suddenly has value. And the value is not owned by the people at the top — it's owned by the people at the bottom, and it works its way out. That's why my system of giving you source material that cannot be owned by somebody breaks that chain.
Basically, the analogy I'm trying to work out is that my words are essentially land — free land that people can build on. Once they add anything to my words, they can build. What I have is a whole bunch of land, and I have 434 things that can be built on that land. But it's way more than that because somebody could take one thing I've written and ten people could do it ten different ways. They could turn that one thing on my land into ten completely different things. My poems basically give everyone a starting point if they use my lyrics to escape the corporate monster that's trying to steal all the profits. I'm giving people free land, and then whatever they build — they can build condos — and whatever they build on my land, they own and they can do what they want with. Other people can build condos in their condos. It's not a physical thing in a sense because it's something you kind of have to think about in your mind and have it expand a few different ways.
The potential is for other people to join their catalogs with my catalog, and we can really, really make something. Because what happens is that the corporations and the fucking greedy people at the top, they're stealing so much of the profits that as of right now, if your music is privately owned, you're seeing as an artist — generally speaking — very, very little of that return on investment, very little of the profits made. So basically, the incentive is for the artists to say, dude, any system is better than this because we are getting raped in the butthole with no Vaseline, as Ice Cube would say.
I have a catalog of 434 lyrics incorporated into, as of right now, 34 albums worth of music. It doesn't have to be specifically in that order or broken up the way I did it. I just did that as a way to show how extensive my catalog is and how I can tell stories within stories within fucking stories if I want. I'm getting pretty good at this, and I've gotten a lot better at writing hooks. When I first started writing the lyrics, I didn't know really how songs were structured, so I just kind of freewrote, or sometimes I would come up with a very distinct pattern. But sometimes I would specifically engineer songs. I did actually quite a lot because I had a lot of good ideas that I wanted to capture.
The blockchain keeps track of who adds what to the song. So it goes from my words, and then you might have somebody come and add guitar, somebody add drums, somebody add vocals, somebody change a couple of the lines to something else. I want to create an app and they register on the app. I have forms that they can fill out to say what song they did and what they did, to keep track of it so that way, down the line, if a cover of a cover of a cover song gets changed a little bit or whatever and blows up, then the people who essentially built that song have a right to some of the profits. So essentially what we're doing is taking my 434 lyrics to be songs and using them as lottery tickets in a way where instead of hanging out and listening to live music, you can hang out and make original songs.
In doing that, we keep track of who says what, who adds what, so that there's the potential to make money — it might not be a billion dollars, but there's a potential to get credit to say, I helped make a great song. The idea is that one version of a song that is made today can get covered and altered two or three or four times, and anytime from now in the next 15 years, 100 years, these songs can kind of live and breathe and change with the times, but still be something that's like a legacy item. What I'm offering is my lyrics as like the great American songbook — passed on from generation to generation.
This whole thing was built on the fact that I'm only really good at writing lyrics and I suck at everything else. When YouTube first came out, it was very people friendly, user friendly, and based on interactions between human beings. You could direct message every artist. My idea was I used YouTube to find the best musicians in the world because I thought I was one of the greatest lyricists in the world.
So here's my final word. I was 17 years old, 16 years old, something like that. I was going to the laundromat with my father in Danversport. And we heard Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." I heard that and I was like, holy shit. This is like the greatest thing I've ever heard. That moment I'm like, dude, I want to do that. That's what I want to do. I've always kind of been a good writer. But I can't sing — I got my mother's voice, which I'm perpetually sad about. So anyway, I heard that at 16 and I'm like, okay. We went to the laundromat, came home, and my father's like, I have that album upstairs. He had a million cassette tapes. I found the Beatles White Album, Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, and a few of his other albums. I started to get into Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and The Who, and basically Led Zeppelin and everybody great from the 60s who a lot of people carried over into the 70s. That cemented my good taste in music.
But then at the same time, I grew up in the 80s and I was a rap kid too. NWA and Tupac — I remember listening to Tupac's first album, 2Pacalypse Now, being like, oh, this guy's different. This hits different. Ice Cube and Ice-T back in the day, Original Gangster, stuff like that. I always had strong roots in the rap game. And I always had strong roots in 60s music. Then stuff like Pearl Jam's first three or four albums — the real good ones — came out. And then Guns N' Roses. So basically, I've always been tuned into good music. I've always kind of sheltered myself as much as possible from listening to a lot of contemporary music. I kind of have a 20-year gap of musical knowledge from like 2000 to 2025, which I've done intentionally because I heard so much crap. I used to work at a store that played the same shitty kids music all the time and it drove me insane. I always tried to shield my mind from terrible music so I didn't get stuck liking bad things.
Stepping back, I can paint my life story differently depending on how you look at it. Once upon a time there was this girl I liked and she was moving away to college, two hours away. I didn't have a car at the time because I lost my license for drinking and driving. So I was like, how am I going to go see this girl? I just started to write some poem about it, something inspired by love. A year before that, I had written a poem on a bathroom wall about a Spanish teacher I didn't like — don't tell anybody. It was probably pretty bad and pretty good at the same time.
From 17, 18 up to about 25, I just kept collecting, writing and not doing anything with it. Just fine-tuning it and building on it. I was working Joe Jobs fixing houses during the day and going to night school at Salem State College. I'd go cut grass and in the landscaping truck I'd have my book of poetry and an empty notebook and fill it up, and study for my quizzes and tests. I graduated college at 25 going nights and working days, after failing out a few times.
Then I ended up meeting this amazing girl — a 20-year-old Belarusian chick who was a 10, 10, 10. I was still a five, five, six, five, five. I ended up going on a second date that lasted three and a half years. She was on a work-travel visa and we hung out for a week or two or three in a row and didn't want it to end. So I said, hey, how can you stay? I'm like, we could get married. So we got married. She graduated from my college, but we were so different, I realized that it wasn't going to work. This was the time when YouTube first came out.
So I was married but basically my plan was to make sure my wife graduated from college and then we'd split up. I would send her out at night on the weekends with her hot Asian girlfriend — not sexual girlfriend, but girlfriend — to go out clubbing and stuff. I stayed home and made fucking songs with Justin Justice and Tyler Thompson over the internet and basically built my arsenal of songs. We ended up splitting up and by around 30 years old, I got a bunch of songs and a big catalog of lyrics that still want to be songs. I'm looking on the internet using YouTube, and then I find the greatest musician, singer, person I've ever met in the entire world — Lady Weaver.
I found her channel and somebody I made a song with says, hey, you got to check this person out. So I check it out and right away I was like, that's the female John Lennon. She came up with the greatest song in the last 50 years, probably without a doubt. She came up with the best song I'd heard in like 40 years called "May We." And then three of the other best songs I've ever heard in my life. I started typing to her — I'm like, you're the one. I don't know what this means, but you're the one.
At that point, I kind of dedicated my life to it. A little stalkery to start, but I called my shot. We started messaging. Then we started emailing, then Skyping, talking on the phone. After two or three years, I went there and lived there for three months. It didn't work out and I'm driven by passion. So I came back at 31, 32 maybe, and I was crushed. Basically, I was never the same again. I lost my passion for most of the next 15 years.
I had periods where I would be artistic and write and stuff and capture my ideas. So I had some good songwriting times and lyric times. But basically everything in my life went to shit for a good 10 years where I really didn't hang out with a lot of people and just kind of hung out with my cats and smoked weed all the time. I probably drank too a little bit. So yeah, I was really a loser for a long time. Slowly, her and I lost touch, and then I started to finally start to come back a little bit, maybe four years ago.
Then I didn't talk to Lady Weaver for two or three years, four years. Then I get an email — this was maybe two and a half years ago. 2022, 2023. The email wasn't from Lady Weaver. It was from her mom saying that she had died of cancer. She left a boy and three young babies behind — she had a fiancé and some children with him. So she left a young adult son and a bunch of babies behind. That's that. That kind of messed me up for a while. But now I'm at a point where I have healed emotionally from that and I don't have any hindrances and hang-ups on that now.
I've really only had one friend the last 15 years, and even that's only the last three or four years. So I've basically been a lone wolf forever and she was the only girl I ever loved. I've pretty much actively avoided females for the better part of the last 15 years. But that's about to change.
I can tell my life a few different ways. At one point I had 10,000 subscribers on YouTube and a bunch of fans and was making music and was well on my way. But then the thing with Lady Weaver — I just lost all my passion and ended up deleting my channels and just going down the drain. But the good thing is that because of the way that all this worked out, in the grand scheme of things, obviously Lady Weaver dying is the biggest travesty in my lifetime, anyone's lifetime. She was the greatest person I've ever met in my entire life and it's not even close. But the good thing that is going to basically happen from me being a dented can for 15 years is that it stopped me from making music with what I had. It gave me a 15-year break from making music, but I didn't stop creating things.
Just in the last two years, I've made three albums worth of stuff — Set List 22, Set List 23, Set List 24. Two of my definitive works. So, what I'm stepping back and seeing, is that with things working out the way they did, it gives me a chance to actually have a much greater impact and legacy than I would have had if I'd just done things straight normally like everybody else. Because what that allows me to do is say, okay, I'm 47, 48 years old and nobody knows who the fuck I am. But I have this amazing catalog of stuff that covers everything and their mother. I have all these fucking vehicles that hyped the shit out of it.
I'm not saying everything I've ever written is amazing and great. But I'm saying that if I have 34 albums worth of material, 20 of those fucking albums are fucking insanely good. Like, holy shit, this is really good. You can make 20 albums out of my 34 albums — 20 great albums — and have some shit left over. Or somebody could come along and take a completely different selection of my titles and put them in a completely different order. Hypothetically, I have the goods to make something like The Wall, like something as cohesive and powerful as a complete thought-unit album. Like Quadrophenia by The Who, or some Lou Reed albums. I have the potential for somebody out there to put this with that and put this with that, get somebody to play this and sing that, and we can be up there with anybody. Because some of my stuff is as good as anybody.
I've always tried to write somewhat timeless. I've always tried to put myself in a bigger perspective than I actually am. I've always tried to take more responsibility as a kind of documentary of humanity. I've taken a big responsibility to make sure that I covered some serious fucking shit and made sure that it's not all just puppies and bunnies — and it's not all fart jokes and fucking erections and orgasms either. My idea for doing all of this is that you take any random 100 people: 20 people are going to make it no matter what, 20 people are going to fall by the wayside no matter what. You can go crazy trying to fix that. But the 60 percent in the middle — I've tried to bring them up. Sometimes I bring them down first. But ultimately I can make an argument that I bring them down to bring them up, because with my catalog, I bring in the people who like the crazy shit and they're exposed to stuff that makes you think. Or I take people who love the love stuff and the poems and the puppies and bunnies, and then I give them some deeper shit and make them think. Either way, I'm bringing you to where I want to bring you.
My final thoughts are that by me going far away to visit Lady Weaver and having it fail, and then having my life kind of go to crap for 15 years — it could potentially benefit the entire world, or not the music industry exactly, but the people who are the artists who are forced to deal with it. This is allowing me to potentially do something that no one has really been able to do. Who the hell is going to sit on 30 years of really really good shit? I don't think too many people do that. So with my life working out weird like it did — and me still being here — it's like I essentially lost the desire to tell my story for 15 years. But now through that time, my story and the way I shaped it and cataloged it and made it available — now my story has to be shared because it could essentially be everybody's story, anybody's story.
By me coming up with the idea of allowing people to use it for free, it's kind of like — if I've been an asshole for the last 15 years and unplugged from society and humanity in my own little world — well, this is my chance to kind of reconnect and give back. So it's like I'm not a terrible person, but I can be a dickhead and I can use people sometimes and throw them away. By me using people and throwing them away, I can say, yeah, but I did it in the name of doing something good. Here's my free fucking book of poetry for the entire world to build on. I could have the potential of reinventing the music industry and getting the money back in the hands of the artists. I'm not perfect, but hey, I'm trying here and I have good intentions.
For a while I didn't care and I kind of just wanted to watch the world burn. I wasn't really invested in it. I didn't give a fuck what happened. To be honest, I'm kind of still that way. But there is a chance — I'll put it this way — if people who are as passionate now as I used to be come across my stuff, then that would be a good match. It's just I don't have that passion anymore. I can help make some songs and stuff, but I'm not trying to change the world like I used to. I lost that. But there are still people who want to change the world and who are still kind of vested in it.
So now I am starting the journey of — instead of hiding behind the internet and making music and not showing my face — now I'm not going to be a public figure, but I'm going to go out there and find people in real life to do something with this and look them in the face and say, look what I do. Then put this whole plan in motion, find some people who are excited about this project because I'm getting pretty excited about it. The closer it is, I'm a week away from being ready with all the things that I want to do — to say, okay, let's launch. Now we can show people. I'm excited to do that. It's about time. It's definitely about time for me to finally share my little light again after hiding in the cave with Bin Laden for 17 years. Okay. That's it. Goodbye.
I want to be very clear about a few things so there's no misunderstanding: The songs I reference in this book are real. The lyrics are real. I am making all of my lyrics available for free with proper use and attribution.
The app that registers users, tracks contributions, and allows for revenue sharing has yet to be built.
This version of my website, my book of lyrics, and the companion guide are real—they exist, and anyone can download them from my site in PDF form.
The idea of making music live with audience participation, both in-person at a venue and online through moderators, with revenue sharing and proper attribution given for proof of collaboration—including the blockchain element—is the part I am actively seeking to put together. That is the vision I am working to make real.
These two books are more business guides and songwriting guides than polished fan-centered bundles intended for sale or monetization. My purpose here is to find my team, a place, and ultimately a fellow visionary who has the resources—or connections—to help make this bottom-up revenue-sharing process real.
This is my mission and my hope: to provide free, foundational material, create a collaborative music ecosystem, and empower artists at every level to participate, build, and be recognized for their contributions. That is what this project is, and that is why I am sharing these words in this form.
Thank you for your time,
Tom Jensen
Tolerant people of the Jewish faith are not a problem to anybody. The state of Israel warmongering on the world stage with blatant disregard for the lives of babies, children, animals, civilians and even friggin' houseplants is a serious fucking problem. A president who has been infiltrated by foreign agents is not serving the will of the citizens of the United States of America and needs to be removed through the democratic process… Democrats, it's been 60 years since you put out somebody worth voting for, sad face emoji….